Pollsters and brothers Jim McLaughlin and John McLaughlin, who work for the Trump campaign, told Newsmax on Monday the 2024 election continues to trend upward for the former president, with him gaining on President Joe Biden in several key blue states.
Nowhere was Donald Trump's rising popularity in blue states shown more than at his rally Saturday night in Wildwood, New Jersey, where an estimated crowd of 100,000 showed up.
"That rally was just flat-out incredible," Jim McLaughlin told "The Chris Salcedo Show." "People were thinking we would have 40,000, maybe 50,000, which would have been an unbelievable number, but ... I've talked to people on the ground. I've talked to some law enforcement folks I know down there. They told me they thought it was well over 100,000 people.
"They had never seen anything like it. ... If you ever get the chance to go, you have to go to one of these things. It is like a cross between a rock concert, a carnival, a football game down south. It is just unbelievable. And the best thing about it are the people that are there."
An Emerson College poll released April 2 showed Trump trailing Biden by 5.3 percentage points both head-to-head and with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other independent candidates in the race.
Biden won New Jersey by 15.9 percentage points in 2020 and Trump lost the state to Hillary Clinton by 14.2 percentage points in 2016. The last Republican presidential candidate to carry New Jersey was George H.W. Bush in 1988.
John McLaughlin noted a Siena College poll released April 22 showed Trump trailing Biden in New York by just 10 percentage points, and that is without Kennedy in the race. Plus, the poll was heavily weighted toward Democrats, with just 22% of respondents identifying as registered Republican voters. Trump lost New York by more than 23 percentage points in 2020 and 2016. Ronald Reagan in 1984 was the last GOP presidential candidate to win New York.
"There may be something going on here," John McLaughlin said. "We already have polls — Jim and I did a poll for the Trump campaign where we're running a little ahead in Minnesota, and we're within 3 points in Virginia.
"So the map is expanding for Donald Trump."
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Michael Katz ✉
Michael Katz is a Newsmax reporter with more than 30 years of experience reporting and editing on news, culture, and politics.
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