ARLINGTON, Va. — Texas is “not a swing state” in the 2020 election, the communications director for President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign says.

That confident projection was shared during a roundtable discussion Trump campaign officials hosted Friday for members of the Regional Reporters Association at the president’s re-election headquarters just across the Potomac River from Washington.

The spokesman, Tim Murtaugh, didn’t elaborate much, other than to say that he and other officials “like Texas.”

“We’ve been hearing for 20 years that there’s the great Democrat hope in Texas,” he said skeptically.

The campaign’s bullish position certainly reflects political history in Texas, where a Democratic presidential candidate has not carried the state since Jimmy Carter in 1976 and where a Democrat has not won any statewide office since 1994.

But it runs counter to some recent polling, along with Democratic gains made in the state last year and the views of even some key Republicans in Texas.

Of particular note is Texas Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican who has been gearing up for a tough re-election challenge in 2020. He's made the point that the GOP can't "take for granted that Texas will be reliably Republican in the foreseeable future, unless we take care of our business."

One of Cornyn's top campaign advisers, Steve Munisteri, went even further in January.

“You should treat Texas as a swing state,” said Munisteri, a former state GOP chairman who joined Cornyn’s campaign this year after working in Trump’s White House for two years. “It's not as red as people think it is. It's actually a competitive state, it's just that we keep winning."

At Trump campaign HQ, though, officials are brimming with confidence all over the electoral map.

"We intend to win where the president won in 2016, and we think there are states that we can move into where the president was close last time,” Murtaugh said.

Sizing up the 2020 battle, Murtaugh said it “doesn’t matter who turns out to be the Democratic nominee.” He said the president will enter the general election, “when it comes, with a tremendous advantage operationally, organizationally, financially.”

“We take nothing for granted, but we like the way the landscape looks for us,” he said.

Any landscape for Trump’s re-election hinges on winning Texas, home to a massive 38 electoral votes.

While the Lone Star State has been a Republican stronghold for decades, Democrats made some inroads last year when former El Paso Rep. Beto O’Rourke — now a White House hopeful — came within three points of toppling Republican Sen. Ted Cruz.

Recent polls have further boosted Texas Democrats’ hopes.

An April survey by Emerson Polling of registered voters in Texas found four top Democratic White House contenders, including the likes of O'Rourke and former Vice President Joe Biden, to be in a statistical dead heat with Trump in hypothetical head-to-head 2020 matchups.

Texas Democratic Party chairman Gilberto Hinojosa this month pointed to that and other polls to argue that the “myth that Texas is red needs to end.”

“Polling, data and election results have shown repeatedly that Texas is the biggest battleground state,” he said. “Both Democrats and Republicans agree that Texas will be in play in 2020.”