White House senior adviser Jared Kushner said public polls have underrepresented Republican voters in their models and cited the “shy” Trump vote as reasons why President Trump could win on Election Day.
“We have to look at what’s the turnout,” said Kushner, who is broadly viewed as the campaign’s de facto chief of staff, during a live interview with Politico Thursday morning. “If you look at a lot of the public polling, you’re using 24% Republican turnout, which is ridiculous. In ’18, ’16, we had 33%.”
He pointed to the Brexit referendum and the 2016 election as two instances of this miscalculation.
“They undercounted by about 3 million how many people were going to vote to ‘leave,’ and the reason why is they just had the turnout all wrong,” Kushner said. “They undercounted a lot of low propensity voters. When you think about the last election, I think the same thing happened.
“I also think you’ve got a lot of shy Trump voters out there, and a lot of people don’t use likely voters in their sample.”
Public polls have consistently showed Trump trailing Democratic nominee Joe Biden, including in states the president won in 2016.
The campaign’s voter file, a database of information used to model turnout and persuasion, was “many times” the 10-million-person sample the campaign used to model turnout in 2016, Kushner said. One of those models showed them winning against Hillary Clinton on Election Day.
Back then, they noticed low-propensity voters waiting for 24 hours to secure a ticket to a Trump rally, he said. “And so we figured out [if] they were gonna wait online, they would probably vote as well. So we built two different turnout models.”
“We were wary,” he added. “We don’t want to believe our own BS, but we basically would do the sample, and then we’d run it through two models.”
This time, Trump 2020 has invested in “data and building out staff,” Kushner said. “We know who our voters are, and we believe there’s plenty of them out there in order for the president to win.”
The Trump campaign is hoping to flip states that it didn’t win in 2016.
“I think last week, we made over a million phone calls,” Kushner said. “We know who the swing voters are. We’ve been testing over the last six months a lot of the messages that help persuade them.”
In Minnesota, where Trump lost by a small margin in 2016, Trump 2020 has established a “robust” operation. “We feel like it’s very competitive,” Kushner said of the state. Voters “don’t like what they’re seeing in Minneapolis with the riots.”
The mayor of Eveleth, Minnesota, a lifelong Democrat who addressed the Republican National Convention on Tuesday, has thrown his support behind Trump, and the campaign expects the same from “a lot of traditional Democrats.”
“The American people like the president’s platform. They like his policies. They want a president who can be bringing jobs back to America from overseas,” Kushner said. “They want law and order. They want somebody to keep your community safe.
“At the end of the day, people will have to decide who you want negotiating for you against China and other countries. And President Trump’s the guy who — he’s a tough guy, but he’s gonna be their tough guy.”
