Former Donald Trump aide Alyssa Farah Griffin warned on Monday during an appearance on CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper about a group of voters that could help the former president win this year’s presidential race.
In just three weeks, Trump, the GOP presidential nominee, and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, will face off for the Oval Office. Throughout the election, key voting blocs like female, Black, Hispanic and Latino voters have been focused on, but Griffin said one demographic has been overlooked.
“I want to note a specific demographic that is not convinced is properly measuring in polls and could actually end up benefiting Donald Trump, which is young white male voters who are first-time voters,” Griffin said. “He has been targeting these folks on podcasts—call them the Joe Rogan, the Barstool Sports voters. Those are people we may not actually be seeing turn out in some of these polls, who are gonna show up for the first time for Donald Trump, so nobody should be resting easy right now.”
Newsweek reached out to Harris and Trump’s campaigns via email for comment Monday evening.
Griffin is a CNN political commentator and a co-host on ABC’s The View. She served as the White House director of strategic communications in 2020, following several communication roles during the Trump presidency, but she left weeks after Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden. She has emerged as a Trump critic and testified before the House select committee tasked with investigating the events on and leading up to the January 6 Capitol riot and Trump’s alleged involvement in it.
A new Pew Research Center poll of registered U.S. voters breaks down voter preferences based on categories of demographics like gender, race and ethnicity and age.
The poll, conducted from September 30 to October 6, found that men are more likely to favor Trump than Harris (51 to 43 percent), while women tend to favor Harris (52 to 43 percent). But Harris does better with younger voters. Poll respondents aged 18 to 29 tend to prefer Harris to Trump (57 to 34 percent). On the other hand, white voters are more likely to favor Trump than Harris (55 to 41 percent). Harris does better with Black, Hispanic and Asian voters in the survey.
Harris has tried to expand her reach in the past few weeks with a media blitz after being criticized for her lack of interaction with the press. She has appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, The View, Howard Stern’s radio show, podcasts such as Call Her Daddy and The Shade Room, local media outlets in swing states and CBS News’ 60 Minutes.
On Wednesday evening, she will sit down with Fox News’ Bret Baier where she will reach a more conservative audience base than she’s used to.
“Alyssa, what do you think of Harris sitting down with Fox for an interview in Pennslyvania?” Tapper asked Griffin on Monday.
She replied: “I think it’s smart. I think she’s going where the voters are. I probably would’ve advised her to do it a month ago.”
“Listen, there are reachable voters at Fox News and what she needs to show up and do is make people who’ve been fed a steady diet of ‘[Kamala’s] unintelligent, she’s not serious enough to be president, she couldn’t stare down [Russian President] Vladimir Putin’—the lines that they’ve been hearing from Donald Trump and his allies. And she needs to show up and give a performance like she did in the debate that showed she’s prepared, she has command of the issues,” Griffin said.
Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
