Former President Donald Trump is returning to the Jersey Shore.
“We have a great rally and we hope you all will be there. It’s in Wildwood, New Jersey. There’s going to be a big crowd,” the former president boasted on the eve of his Saturday rally.
Wildwood, on the southern tip of the Jersey Shore, is part of the Garden State’s Cape May County, a heavily Republican county in a long-standing blue state.
Trump held a rally in Wildwood in January 2020. But the then-president ended up losing New Jersey by 16 points to President Biden four years ago.
WHERE IS THE BIDEN-TRUMP MATCH SIX MONTHS UNTIL ELECTION DAY
President Donald Trump attends a rally at the Wildwood Convention Center in Wildwood, New Jersey on January 28, 2020. (Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
For Trump, the weekend rally comes a short distance from New York, where he spends his weekdays in court, making history as the first president, former or current, to be tried in a case criminal.
“We’re going to try to win the state of New Jersey. I want people to know I love it,” Trump predicted Friday in a local radio interview in the Garden State. “You know, it’s not just going to be, hell, maybe we can get close. We’re going to win it.”
But Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, a Biden surrogate, told reporters hours later that “Jersey is not going to be a welcoming place for Trump.”
And Biden campaign communications director Michael Tyler noted that “Trump’s team is talking about New Jersey. They’re talking about holding concerts at Madison Square Garden to attract voters in states like New York. I think that here on planet Earth, in the Biden campaign, we are going to stay focused on winning 270 electoral votes.”
CLICK HERE FOR THE LATEST FOX NEWS POLL FOR THE 2024 ELECTIONS
While flipping the Garden State may not be at the top of the Trump campaign’s to-do list, it does highlight his chances in two other blue states that Biden won comfortably in 2020 — Minnesota and Virginia.
As the Trump and Biden campaigns prepare for a battle in seven swing states that decided the 2020 elections (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which Biden narrowly won, and North Carolina, which Trump won in a landslide). thin margin) and likely will be again in the 2024 rematch, both campaigns see opportunities to expand the map.
Last weekend, at a closed-door Republican National Committee retreat for top donors held at a Palm Beach, Fla., resort, Trump campaign senior advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, along with veteran investigator Tony Fabrizio, have uncovered internal investigations suggesting both “Minnesota.” & Virginia are clearly in play.”
Former President Donald Trump leads a Republican National Committee spring donor retreat in Palm Beach, Florida, on May 4. (Donald Trump 2024 campaign)
“In both states, Donald Trump is in a position to overturn key electoral votes in his favor,” underlines the investigation, shared with Fox News.
Trump is expected to return to Minnesota next weekend to host a state GOP fundraising dinner.
And both states have significant populations of rural white voters without college degrees who disproportionately support the former president.
Biden’s campaign disagrees that Minnesota or Virginia are up for grabs.
While noting that they are “not taking any state or vote for granted,” Biden campaign battleground states director Dan Kanninen told reporters earlier this week that “we’re not seeing polls six or seven months before a general election, the leader “Direct figures, certainly, because any means more predictive than a weather report is expected in six or seven months. “
TRUMP ATTEMPTS TO FIX HIS FUNDRAISING GAP WITH BIDEN
Kanninen pointed out that the campaign has teams on the ground in both states engaging voters.
“We are confident that the Biden-Harris coalition in Minnesota and Virginia, which was strong in the midterm and off-year elections, will continue to be strong for us in the fall of 2024,” he added. .
And Biden campaign spokeswoman Lauren Hitt, pointing to the president’s current fundraising dominance and home-field advantage in key battlegrounds, argued that “Trump’s team has so little campaign or infrastructure to talk about it that she resorts to leaking memos that say “the polls. we paid to show ourselves that we were winning.’”
This is the second election in a row in which Trump aims to flip Minnesota.
At a late September 2020 rally in northern Minnesota, Trump bragged about the size of the crowd and insisted that “this is not someone’s crowd that’s going to finish second in this State Behind Sleepy Joe,” a derogatory term he used for Biden.
President Biden attends his visit to the Chavis Community Center in Raleigh, North Carolina on March 26. (Reuters/Elizabeth Frantz)
While Trump’s campaign is looking for opportunities to expand the map in Minnesota and Virginia, Biden’s campaign appears to be interested in the swing states of North Carolina as well as Florida.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
Trump won the Sunshine State by less than four points in 2020, but two years ago, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and Republican Sen. Marco Rubio each won re-election by nearly 20 points.
LaCivita argued that the Biden campaign was playing “a false game” in both states, but insisted that Trump had “a real opportunity to expand the map in Virginia and Minnesota.”
Get the latest 2024 election campaign updates, exclusive interviews and more on our Fox News Digital election hub.