Trump campaign moves to shore up Florida and Georgia
A recent poll from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows that Biden tied with Trump in likely voters. Yahoo Finance’s Rick Newman joins The Final Round to discuss how Trump’s campaign is trying to retain its voting majority in the south.
Video Transcript
SEANA SMITH: Welcome back to The Final Round. Let's talk about the election and the race in some of the battleground states. We only have six weeks to go, and both Joe Biden and President Trump are doing all they can to win over those battleground states.
We had a couple of new polls out. This week a CBS news poll showing that Biden is up by two points in Florida, and then there was another survey showing that Biden is actually tied with Trump in Georgia.
And, Rick Newman, this is interesting, because for a number of reasons. But one, we know that Trump is so desperate to win at least-- all states obviously-- but particularly, Georgia and Florida.
RICK NEWMAN: Right, so Florida is always a contested state. It's been that way for several election cycles now. But Georgia, what's going on there? That's normally a pretty safe red state, and now we're seeing polls showing that Biden might have a chance there. So I'm sure that has a lot to do with changing demographics over time. And Biden is actually putting some money into Georgia.
We're also hearing talk that Texas could be close this year. And when many analysts talk about six swing states, which is Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona, but if you enlarge that out to 10, some analysts say Texas. We need to consider Texas a swing state. So it's really interesting.
I just did some analysis of where these two campaigns are spending ad money, and they're both spending a disproportionate amount of money in North Carolina. So that tells you both of these candidates think North Carolina's really important. That could turn out to be a tipping-point state, and Florida is as important as it always was.
SEANA SMITH: Well, Rick, thinking of the ad spending, how much of that is at play with Biden being able to catch up and in some states maybe even take the lead here in Georgia? Because we know that that has been a big focus for his campaign now for a couple weeks.
RICK NEWMAN: Yeah, this is another surprising thing if you just go back to where we were six months ago. Biden is substantially out-raising Trump at this point, which means he just has a lot more money to spend on advertising.
There have also been some allegations of reckless spending in the Trump campaign. When Brad Parscale was the campaign manager, they knocked him down a couple notches and replaced him as campaign manager. And I've seen some analysis saying that the Trump campaign had a billion dollars in the bank at one point, and it's not clear where all that money went.
A billion dollars, that's about as much as-- I think that's more than either candidate spent total back in 2016. So Trump had a lot of money, and he doesn't have a lot of money right now. So not clear exactly what happened there.
