Former President Donald Trump is making a bold push into two states once written off as blue, opening a combined 19 field offices in Virginia and Minnesota with the 2024 presidential election less than five months away.

The Trump campaign confirmed to Fox News that it is expanding operations in the two states that have voted reliably Democrat in recent presidential elections. The Trump campaign is in the process of securing leases for eight Trump Force 47 field offices in Minnesota and another 11 in Virginia, according to a Trump campaign memo obtained by Fox News on Friday.

Staff have already been hired to manage each state, and the campaign is currently working to build out teams to work each field office in favor of the former president.

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In its memo, the campaign noted that “collateral materials will land in early July in both states, and we’ve already begun to generate Trump Force 47 Captain recruits to get them into training.”

The Trump campaign, which views both Minnesota and Virginia as competitive in the upcoming election, aims to flip both states as it pushes to expand the 2024 electoral map.

At a closed-door Republican National Committee retreat for top-dollar donors earlier this spring at a resort in Palm Beach, Florida, senior Trump campaign advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita and veteran pollster Tony Fabrizio spotlighted internal surveys that suggested both “Minnesota & Virginia are clearly in play.”

“In both states, Donald Trump finds himself in positions to flip key electoral votes in his favor,” the survey, which was shared with Fox News, emphasizes.

It’s been two decades since a Republican carried Virginia in the race for the White House – the last time being when then-President George W. Bush won the Commonwealth in his 2004 re-election victory.

But recent polling indicates a close contest in Virginia.

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Former President Donald Trump speaks during a “Get Out the Vote” rally in Richmond, Virginia, on March 2, 2024. (SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)

A Fox News poll conducted June 1 to 4 indicates the Democratic president and his Republican predecessor in the White House each with 48% support in a head-to-head match.

A Republican hasn’t carried Minnesota in a presidential election since President Richard Nixon’s 1972 landslide re-election, over a half-century ago. It was the only state President Reagan lost in his 1984 re-election landslide.

But a recent poll in Minnesota showed a competitive race between Biden and Trump in their 2024 election rematch. The president stands at 45% support among likely voters in Minnesota, with Trump at 41% in a poll conducted June 3 to 5 for the Star Tribune, MPR News and KARE 11.

Trump was narrowly edged in Minnesota in the 2016 election by 1.5 points by Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. But four years later, Biden carried the state by seven points as he defeated Trump and won the White House.

Former President Donald Trump speaks at the annual Lincoln Reagan Dinner hosted by the Minnesota Republican Party on May 17, 2024, in St. Paul, Minnesota. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

“We’re going to win this state,” Trump predicted last month in a speech as he headlined the state GOP’s annual Lincoln Reagan fundraising dinner in St. Paul, Minnesota’s capital city.

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The poll pointed to a significant enthusiasm gap, with 63% of Trump supporters saying they were “very enthusiastic” about casting a ballot for their candidate, compared to 31% of voters backing the president.

Thirty years ago, Californians passed a ballot measure that catalyzed a generation of Latino voters. Proposition 187 aimed to deny virtually all public services to the undocumented and their children. Written largely in response to the transformative demographic change occurring in California at the time, the measure triggered a seismic shift in racial politics and galvanized Latino activists, some of whom would eventually hold the state’s most powerful political offices. The plight of undocumented and recent immigrants became an indelible part of the political narrative for a generation of Latinos and their leaders.

Something remarkable and unprecedented happened in 1994, the year of the Proposition 187 campaign. Nearly two-thirds of Latinos voted against the measure as a bloc across parties, genders, generations and national origins. They melded into an ethnic political coalition built on the narrative of the undocumented and migrant experience.

As Latino politicians amassed power and numbers over the ensuing decades, however, a curious phenomenon emerged: Latino voter participation began to drop dramatically. To this day, Latinos vote at lower rates than any other race or ethnicity in California.

At the same time, nearly every high-quality survey of Latino voters identified jobs and the economy as their top concerns. Latinos disproportionately suffer from California’s economic challenges, from housing affordability to high poverty to educational barriers. And they have been clamoring for an ambitious economic agenda from Sacramento, especially its growing number of Latino politicians. And yet no campaign or party has developed a working-class economic agenda to answer Latinos’ concerns.

Instead, Latinos are still widely misunderstood as an aggrieved racial minority motivated by immigration, farmworker and border issues. This is one of the most striking blind spots in American politics: The fastest-emerging group of voters in the country is quantifiably telling political leaders what they need and want to hear, and yet both parties persist in the belief that they understand Latinos better than they understand themselves.

The most rapid growth in Latino participation is taking place among third- and fourth-generation, U.S.-born voters. And even in California, the latest evidence shows that the catalyzing immigration politics of the last century are no longer resonating in this century. Latino voting behavior is undergoing a generational shift.

California political data expert Paul Mitchell noted in Capitol Weekly recently that in Los Angeles County, which is home to more Latinos than any other county in the country, the share of registered voters who are foreign born had plummeted from 55% to less than 9% over the last two decades. This is an extraordinary transformation of the Latino electorate. Moreover, almost 40% of Latino voters weren’t even alive during the formative political events of the Proposition 187 era.

California has long been the great Latino exception. For one thing, immigrants make up more of California’s population than any other state’s: Our 10.4 million immigrants represent 27% of California’s population and 23% of the whole nation’s foreign-born.

Despite this rich immigrant tapestry, however, California’s Latinos are overwhelmingly U.S.-born and growing more so. California was not exhibiting the measurable rightward shift of Latino voters that was evident in other states until recently, but now it is. It’s just been harder to see due to the state’s large number of older immigrant and left-leaning voters.

Economic frustration could be a key reason for the shift. A recent study reported that only 9% of Latino households could afford the state’s median home price. Fifty-five percent of California families in the bottom 10% of incomes are Latino or Black. By virtually every economic metric, in a state with more Latino elected officials than most, Latinos aren’t doing well.

Housing affordability and other economic issues are moving Latinos off the sidelines and out of their traditional pattern of supporting Democrats in great numbers, so much so that even the Golden State is no longer an outlier. Robb Korinke of California Target Book (a partner in my firm, GrassrootsLab) found measurable Latino voter registration shifts away from Democrats in every one of California’s competitive congressional districts since the midterm election. At the same time, the performance gap between Republicans and Democrats in Latino-dense state legislative districts has closed considerably.

Are we witnessing a transformation of the Latino vote? Registration, turnout and other data point strongly in that direction. It’s time for policymakers, many of whom came of age with the narrative that defined the end of the last century, to recognize that we’re on the precipice of a new Latino political identity in a new Latino century.

Mike Madrid is a political consultant and the author of the forthcoming “The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority is Changing Democracy,” from which this was adapted.

Dr. Eithan Haim, the Texas physician who admits to having leaked hospital records alleging that doctors were performing transgender medical procedures on children and has pleaded not guilty to four felony counts related to the disclosure, has vowed to fight the charges and considers himself a whistleblower – albeit one who could spend a decade behind bars.

While Haim said he is trying to remain positive and contends that federal trials “are unpredictable,” the Department of Justice (DOJ) is rarely bested and boasts a 99.6% conviction rate. Still, Haim views the legal battle ahead of him as a necessary one.

“Doctors and nurses are the last pillar holding up this whole house of cards,” he told Fox News Digital. “Once that falls, these people are going to have to face a reckoning of the consequences of their actions that they had participated in and proliferated the greatest medical crime in human history.”

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Health care defense attorney Ron Chapman also believes Haim has a strong case on freedom of speech grounds, since the leaked documents were of public interest amid a major ongoing cultural clash.

“It’s got serious free speech concerns when we see that the purpose was to produce information to the public, because he probably didn’t trust the Department of Justice for this information,” he said. “That’s why he didn’t send it to them. He trusted the press, and so I think that there’s a pretty significant free speech defense here.”

Chapman said it also appears as if the government is going out of its way to prosecute Haim. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) lacks criminal penalties for violations and falls under the purview of the Office of Civil Rights within the Department of Justice for investigation. Infractions typically result in fines being levied against hospitals or facilities.

“While the government may technically have the ability to prove the elements here because of the nature of the access, I think there are going to be a lot of very solid defense arguments in this case that the intent was not for an unlawful purpose, that there was no attempt to make money off of this or scam anybody, but it was for a legitimate public concern, and that really should be for First Amendment protected conduct,” Chapman said.

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Transgender surgical procedures and treatments for children have been protected in some states, while others have outlawed them. (Getty Images)

But statutes signed this year by President Biden could prove a significant obstacle. 

Biden signed an executive order in April that protects Americans’ personal information. The order was intended as part of the effort to stomp out the popular social media app TikTok amid a raft of national security concerns. But Chapman said, “When there’s that regulation in existence, unauthorized access without specific permission then becomes a crime.”

“You have just created a behemoth that can target any individual who decides to shed light on something, and openness should be the goal of our country, not silos and secrecy,” he added. “I still remain very concerned that this is something that even resulted in federal criminal charges, much less multiple federal criminal charges with such drastic consequences.”

The DOJ unsealed the indictment against Haim on Monday. The charges were related to HIPAA violations stemming from Haim’s allegations that the Texas Children’s Hospital was secretly conducting transgender procedures and treatments on minors.

The previously sealed indictment, filed May 29 by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas, accused Haim of attempting to re-activate his login credentials under false pretenses after they had expired due to a lack of activity.  

The indictment by U.S. Attorney Alamdar S. Hamdani alleges that Haim “obtained unauthorized individually identifiable health HIPAA protected information on pediatric patients” and “caused malicious harm to TCH, pediatric patients at TCH and its physicians by contacting a media contact.” 

If found guilty, Haim could be sentenced to a maximum of 10 years in federal prison. He also faces a fine of up to $250,000.

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Dr. Eithan Haim says the hospital was secretly continuing with gender-affirming care procedures despite claiming the program would be dissolved. (The Ingraham Angle/Screengrab)

The indictment accuses Haim of illegally accessing personal information from the hospital’s electronic system. This included patient names, treatment codes and attending physicians. Through the documents, Haim said he discovered that the Houston-based children’s hospital was continuing to perform transgender medical procedures – such as those involving implantable puberty blockers – according to the original report. 

The children’s hospital in 2022 said it would cease performing transgender procedures on children. That announcement came after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said some of the medical interventions could be considered child abuse under state law. The hospital did not respond to Fox News Digital’s requests for comment.

Haim, who said he has refused to take a plea agreement, told Fox News Digital that he was first approached at his door by FBI agents in June 2023. During the course of the next six months, Haim said he decided to take the case public.

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“The problem is that if you legitimize this corruption in this process, then you shut the door for every other whistleblower in the country within the health care system,” Haim said. “But with that choice, you empower these individuals, because you grant them the legitimacy which they do not deserve, right? 

“So, even though the stakes are the highest possible stakes – my freedom – when you consider it in those terms, of course it’s what we have to do. Because the alternative is something to be so much more afraid of.”

Fox News Digital’s Kristine Parks contributed to this report.