Dozens of state, district, and county Republican Party heads see an electoral landscape not much different for President Trump today than at the start of the year, giving them a positive outlook that stands in contrast to most recent polls.
“The more bad things happen in the country, it just solidifies support for Trump,” GOP chairman for Robeson County, North Carolina, Phillip Stephens told Politico. “We’re calling him ‘Teflon Trump.’ Nothing’s going to stick, because if anything, it’s getting more exciting than it was in 2016.”
Stephens said that this year, “We’re thinking landslide.”
Robeson County is among several rural North Carolina counties that went from supporting President Barack Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016.
The president has dropped in recent head-to-head polls against former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee, with Biden leading by 8 percentage points in the RealClearPolitics average.
Trump summoned senior campaign advisers to a meeting last month in the wake of surveys that showed him slipping in key battleground states.
However, a recent Zogby poll of likely voters asked to identify which candidate they thought would win, regardless of who they support politically, gave Trump an 8 percentage point lead over Biden, at 51% to 43%.
And the chairman of the Republican Party in Minnesota’s 8th Congressional District, Ted Lovdahl, said some of his friends will tell pollsters “just exactly the opposite of what they feel.”
When Lovdahl asked one of them why, the person said, “I don’t like some of their questions. It’s none of their business what I do.”
Arkansas Republican Party Chairman Doyle Webb said his one concern would be another downturn, but he doesn’t see this happening.
The head of Pennsylvania’s Erie County Republican Party Veral Salmon touted the many requests that he’d received for Trump yard signs as indicative of high voter enthusiasm.
Chairman of the Pennsylvania Republican Party Lawrence Tabas said that he thought Trump would double his 2016 margin over Biden, beating him in November by more than 100,000 votes.
Indiana Republican Party leader Kyle Hupfer said he was “way more” optimistic today than at the same point in 2016.
Pollster Neil Newhouse of Public Opinion Strategies said last month that he didn’t think Trump’s poll numbers were representative of his support. “I’m still convinced there is a shy Trump supporter, a hidden Trump vote, that voters who are unwilling to tell somebody on the telephone that they’re supporting him are going to vote for him,” Newhouse said.
