Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has begun installing field operations teams in a handful of traditionally blue states, as he attempts to make good on his promise to secure general election victories in places where “no Republican would even run in.”
The Trump campaign has hired staffers in Minnesota, Maine, Pennsylvania and Virginia, according to separate reports Tuesday by the Associated Press and Fox News.
Recommended Stories
With the exception of Virginia, no Republican nominee has carried those states since former President George H.W. Bush’s landslide victory against Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis in 1988.
“All of those states have one thing in common: there are a lot of lost manufacturing jobs in those states [and] they are states where Republican registration increased dramatically in the last few months,” Trump’s senior campaign adviser Barry Bennett told Fox News on Tuesday afternoon.
“This campaign will be about putting states on the board, not taking them off. And my guess is that even more will come on the board as we get through this process,” Bennett added.
According to the AP, the Trump campaign plans to appoint state directors in nearly 15 states by the end of May, including Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Florida. Much of the campaign’s operations in those states will be funded by the Republican National Committee’s building fund, which is open to individual contributions of more than $100,000.
“Up until three weeks ago, there were 102 or 103 employees, which is fewer than Ben Carson had in January,” Bennett told the AP. “Today, that number is much bigger, and it’s growing every day.”
Trump has also expanded his campaign operation in other areas in recent weeks. The billionaire appointed Wall Street veteran Steven Mnuchin to be his national finance director earlier this month and hired seasoned Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio on Monday.
Furthermore, Bennett and Trump’s convention manager Paul Manafort have been hosting weekly meetings with GOP lawmakers in Washington as they seek to court additional support and build enthusiasm for the candidate on Capitol Hill.
An NBC News/Survey Monkey poll released Tuesday found that Trump has begun narrowing the gap between him and Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton. The New York real estate mogul now trails Clinton by three percentage points, 48 to 45 percent, placing him just outside the poll’s 1.2 percent margin of error.
