Former President Donald Trump‘s team admitted that he lost two key battleground states in a new memo.
In a new confidential memo, Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio informed the Trump campaign Friday that independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.‘s decision to drop out of the race and endorse Trump is “good news” for Republicans.
But there was one line of that caught the attention of political observers. After calculating how Kennedy’s vote will break for Trump, Fabrizio—a veteran GOP pollster and longtime Trump ally—acknowledged that Trump lost Arizona and Georgia to President Joe Biden four years ago. Trump has still not conceded the 2020 election.
“To put these numbers into perspective, the net vote gained in a states like Arizona based on just a 2020 turnout model would be over 41,000 votes nearly 4 times Biden’s winning margin or in Georgia the net gain. would be over 19,000 votes nearly twice Biden’s margin,” the memo reads.
Biden flipped both Arizona and Georgia blue in the last presidential election. In the past 72 years, only two Democratic presidential nominees—Bill Clinton and Harry Truman—have won Arizona in the general election. Biden’s win in Georgia was another major victory for the Democratic Party, who had not won the Southern state in nearly 30 years.
The memo was obtained by NBC News’ Sahil Kapur. Newsweek reached out to the Trump campaign via email for comment.
Fabrizio’s note comes hours after Kennedy suspended his presidential campaign and threw his support behind Trump.
At a press conference from Arizona, the independent candidate said the “principled causes” that pushed him to leave the Democratic Party, and now back Trump were “Free speech, the war in Ukraine, and the war on our children.”
“One of the two candidates has adopted these issues as his own to the point where he has asked to enlist me in his administration,” he said. “I’m speaking, of course, of Donald Trump.”
It’s not only Kennedy’s endorsement that Trump benefits from. Polls show that Kennedy had more appeal with Trump voters than Biden or Harris voters, meaning his decision to drop out means those votes could likely go to the GOP.
For much of the election cycle, Democrats portrayed Kennedy as a “spoiler” who was taking votes from Biden and thus, helping Trump. But after Biden withdrew from he race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, surveys began showing that Kennedy was hurting Trump more than Harris.
“Whe you hear or see the Harris team and/or the Democrats try and spin otherwise, now that the data clearly paints a different picture,” Fabrizio wrote. “This is good news for President Trump’s campaign — plain and simple.”
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