Trump campaign officials have mapped seven different paths to the White House, outlining the Electoral College mathematics that can help the president reach the 270 votes he needs for a second term.
Their slides show the possibilities, with states flitting from blue to red or back again in seven scenarios, from 2016’s status quo to a “landslide” blowout or a narrower win based on “Midwest strength.”
The point was to push back against claims that President Trump had a limited path to victory and illustrate multiple ways he could win. But study the slides, and a hierarchy of states becomes apparent.
Lose traditional bellwether Florida, and there are two paths to victory, for example — picking up Minnesota for the first time since 1972, or squeaking through with 270 votes in a scenario called “blue wall collapsed.”
But lose Pennsylvania, and there is only a single route through the map. The scenario is called “working-class surge,” again picking up Minnesota.
The notion that holding Pennsylvania was crucial to a Republican president’s chance of reelection would not have made much sense until Trump won the state in 2016 by a lick more than 44,000 votes. It had voted Democratic in the previous six elections.
“I can’t stress this enough: This map would have been nonsensical 10 years ago or 20 years ago,” said a senior campaign official. “President Trump changed that map, and we have more options to get to 270 than any other Republican candidate running in my lifetime.”
According to the data analysis website FiveThirtyEight, the state has a 31% chance of being the “tipping state,” providing the crucial Electoral College votes to tip one candidate or the other over the top.
No wonder both candidates have been peppering the area with visits. Trump visited three times in the first 15 days of September, including for a 9/11 service at the Flight 93 memorial in Shanksville, where Joe Biden arrived a little more than two hours later in a careful piece of scheduling.
Two of Trump’s trips (and one by his son Eric) were to the southwestern, rural counties around Pittsburgh. At one time, the conventional thinking was that western and eastern Pennsylvania were Democratic and the areas in between were Republican; now, counties throughout the state have been turning redder, with the sole exception of Philadelphia and its suburbs.
The result has been a campaign that focuses on jobs, the economy, and crucially, in a state that counts energy as one of its major industrial sectors, Democrats’ stance on green energy and their opposition to fracking.
That was the issue that made Ron Jurysta, 45, get in his car and drive the hour and a half from Butler, north of Pittsburgh, to the Arnold Palmer Regional Airport in Latrobe in early September to hear Trump speak.
He works with propane, one of the products of fracking, which uses high-pressure liquids to force gas or oil from rock fissures.
“We load it on to rail cars, and from here, it goes all over the country,” he said while waiting for Air Force One to arrive. “If Biden bans fracking, it’s going to dry up my work.”
Biden has been on the defensive in recent weeks, saying he has no plans to ban fracking, but last year, aides were twice forced to clean up his mess when he said he would eliminate the use of fossil fuels. And those sentiments have become a central theme of Trump’s stump speeches in Pennsylvania.
For his part, Jurysta said he has heard Biden’s recent denials and was not convinced.
“I heard those statements in the past that he would end fracking. He’s flip-flopping,” he said.
Despite the controversy, Biden has a narrow lead, according to pollsters, and Democrats are confident they can snatch back Pennsylvania.
David Bergstein, director of battleground state communications for the Democratic National Committee, said Trump was running a campaign to turn out his base because he knew he had lost independents and centrists in the cities and suburbs.
“Those swing voters really play a critical role in these kinds of close elections,” he said. “Every time Trump moves further and further to trying to turn out his base, he loses more and more of those kinds of voters who are going to play a crucial role.”
