Republican National Committee Chairman Joe Gruters said Tuesday that last-minute GOP spending and campaign stops in traditionally safe states like Kansas, Iowa, Florida, South Carolina and Nebraska were a routine midterm-cycle precaution, not a sign of trouble, and predicted Republicans would “surprise a lot of people” with their results on Election Night.
Gruters made the comments during an Election Day interview on Breitbart News Daily. Host Mike Slater pressed him on why President Trump and the party had directed resources into states that should be comfortably Republican, asking whether that spending signaled weakness Democrats could use to their advantage.
“I think that’s encouraged a lot of Democrats that if we’re having to spend time and money and energy and the president’s resources to go to these red places, that doesn’t look good for the Republican Party. What’s your counter to that? Why did you go to those places?” Slater asked.
Gruters said the moves were standard midterm strategy rather than a defensive scramble. “In the midterm cycle, just like we do in midterms, what do you try to do? You try to expand the map, and so polling got a little tight. The Democrats started moving resources, and so we just had to shore up some of those states,” he said.
He expressed confidence the party would hold its ground in the states in question. “We’re going to be fine in South Carolina, Kansas, Nebraska. They will all be Republicans at the end of the day. But you know, it did require us to spend a little bit of time and effort. But that’s not unusual in the midterm cycle,” Gruters said.
The chairman argued that treating every race as competitive, regardless of polling, is simply good campaign discipline. “Candidates need to run races. It doesn’t matter if you’re 20 points up; you have to run a race like you’re 10 points down. You have to take every race seriously, and you’ve got to fight for it. And that’s what we’re doing,” he said.
“The president going to you know all these different states and working hard is just reflective of the overall mood and the headwinds we face, but that being said, I think that we have the candidates. We have the resources that we needed to put up, and our get out the vote effort is second to none. The good thing is Republicans work. We’ve been preparing, and we’re ready to go.”
Gruters said Republicans were poised to “drop the hammer tonight” and that he expected outcomes that would catch observers off guard. “I think we’re going to surprise a lot of people in some of these races, and I think we’re going to come out with some victories that people will be surprised about,” he said.
Breitbart News Daily airs weekdays on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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