President Trump is pushing to expand the electoral map to include states he narrowly lost to Hillary Clinton in 2016, despite being threatened in the ones where he was victorious.
Trump campaigned Sunday in Nevada, with a large indoor rally in Henderson. He will appear in Minnesota this week. And he held a rally in New Hampshire late last month, the day after delivering his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention from the White House.
“We’re going to win. We’re going to win,” Trump vowed in Manchester. “Does anybody have any doubt?”
The move comes as polls show Trump in a tight race in Florida and North Carolina while trailing in polling averages for Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. These are all states Trump carried four years ago, though mostly by small margins.
“They are playing defense in so many states, they need an offense state,” said Amy Koch, a former Minnesota senate majority leader.
The attempt to pick off states that went for Clinton can be second-guessed based on public polls showing him trailing in them and the need to shore up the Rust Belt. Clinton tried to flip normally Republican states such as Arizona, where Trump seemed vulnerable, when she needed to focus on Wisconsin. Trump has cut back on ad spending in Nevada and New Hampshire. But operatives in all three states believe Trump has a real chance to win.
“The president has obsessed about winning New Hampshire since falling short here by such a small margin in 2016,” said Jim Merrill, a Republican strategist in the Granite State. “They’ve had a large and smart team working the ground game for a long time now, and we’re seeing more campaign visits and an uptick in paid media. He is an underdog for sure, but a path for Trump to win New Hampshire exists.”
Trump lost New Hampshire by just 0.3 points, as Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte also went down in defeat. Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson, a former two-term Republican governor of New Mexico whose running mate was a former two-term Republican governor of neighboring Massachusetts, received 4.1% of the vote.
After Mitt Romney lost Nevada by 6.68 points and John McCain lost it by 12.49 points, Trump lost the state by just 2.42 points. He became the first Republican to win the presidency without Nevada’s electoral votes since William Howard Taft. GOP Sen. Dean Heller lost his seat in the 2018 midterm elections by about 5 points.
Minnesota went for Clinton over Trump by just 1.5 points, the closest presidential contest in the traditionally Democratic state since Walter Mondale held off Ronald Reagan by fewer than one vote per precinct in 1984. Just 44,765 votes separated the two major-party candidates. Conservative independent Evan McMullin won nearly 54,000 votes, Johnson the Libertarian took more than 112,000.
Unlike in Nevada and New Hampshire, the 2016 polls largely failed to predict Minnesota’s closeness, a fact that buoys Trump supporters in spite of new surveys showing the president down 9 points there this year.
“Trump would have won last time” if he could have attracted Republicans who voted third party, Koch said. She added Minnesota “has definitely been shifting back and forth” between Democratic challenger Joe Biden and Trump, “and who knows where we’ll end up?” The divide between rural voters and large, liberal cities — Minneapolis, the city where George Floyd died in police custody, has become an epicenter of occasionally violent racial justice protests — looms large.
“I think it’s definitely in play,” former Nevada state GOP Chairwoman Amy Tarkanian said of her state. Even though “we used to be more of a purple state, but now, we’re leaning blue.”
A common thread in all three states is that the Trump campaign has remained active on the ground while COVID-19 has made the Democrats more scarce, though Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris, have them on their travel itineraries. “A lot of campaigns up and leave,” said Tarkanian. “President Trump’s team has stayed in place.”
The Trump campaign is hardly neglecting the states the president won by small margins four years ago. He has appeared in Pennsylvania. Donald Trump Jr. was in Michigan with Kid Rock on Monday. Ivanka Trump was dispatched to North Carolina, with Arizona, Texas (for a fundraiser), and Florida soon to follow. Vice President Mike Pence has been to Michigan and Wisconsin, as well as Minnesota, and is headed to Arizona.
But turning an extra state or two red could be valuable insurance in what figures to be a closely fought contest in the Electoral College, as Biden threatens in multiple Trump 2016 states. “It’s definitely not going to be easy,” Tarkanian said.
