The most telling sign of Trump’s defensive stance is his recent giant TV ad. The campaign is spending a lot to retain the states it won in 2016 and to shore up support in places where a Republican should already dominate, such as Georgia or the Florida Panhandle.
Publicly, the Trump campaign claims his candidate is still competitive in each of the 30 states he led in 2016. They say presumptive Democratic candidate Joe Biden faces a lack of enthusiasm among his party’s most likely voters and that Public polls, many of which have shown that the president lags far behind Biden nationally, and more closely in battlefield states, disagree with his own internal numbers.
“President Trump plans to win all the states he made in 2016, in addition to collecting others. We are in an excellent position to be on the offensive and would rather be in our shoes than in Joe Biden’s, ”said senior adviser Jason Miller.
But privately, campaign aides, top administration officials, and GOP donors have begun to recognize what they call a more plausible scenario: a couple of losses in the Rust Belt, most likely in Michigan and Wisconsin. That could It means the president has to win some proven states of Trump aversion to break the 270-vote threshold needed to reach a second term.
Gone are the days of predicting a landslide victory, a person close to the Trump campaign said. The president’s team is now reformulating its expectations to identify not where Trump can earn more, but how he can lose less.
“We don’t need 306. We only need 270. We can lose Michigan and lose Pennsylvania and still win,” said a senior Trump adviser, noting that a victory in New Hampshire, combined with one in Nevada or New Mexico, would provide enough support from the Election College to avoid defeat, even if Biden wins big in the industrial Midwest.
That strategy represents a base of 260 electoral votes, a sum of each state that Trump led four years ago except Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which add up to a total of 46 Electoral College votes. To ensure its effectiveness, the campaign has recently moved to shore up its base states, including North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Iowa. The president’s position among independents and older people has eroded in those places in the midst of his running. from the coronavirus pandemic, the economic slowdown and riots caused by the murder of George Floyd.
A fall advertising blitz booked by the Trump campaign last week reflected the campaign’s efforts to solidify the states it had run four years ago. On Monday, the campaign yielded $ 95 million in television commercials to run from early September through Election Day in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. A second purchase slated to drive total campaign spending this week to $ 188 million is expected to include Michigan, New Mexico and Iowa.
Both Florida and Ohio, the last of which Trump easily won in 2016, recently re-entered state territory, a development that has worried Trump’s allies who previously viewed them as easy wins. Trump’s announcements in Georgia and Arizona, trusted red states in 2016, indicate that his team sees Biden as a threat in the solar belt.
“We are propping up our home base to build up to 270. We need to solidify them as best we can, with Florida at the center of it all,” said Trump’s top adviser, adding that Iowa and Ohio are “closer to what we want in this moment”.
The campaign’s last ad purchase also included an investment of nearly $ 10,000 in the Atlanta market. That worried a Republican agent who said the campaign’s ground operation in the state, led by Trump’s Victory Team, “has been asking for instructions from the campaign or the Republican National Committee for several months to no avail.”
The last time Georgia broke for the Democratic presidential candidate was in 1976, but a recent Fox News poll showed Biden with a limited advantage.
Biden is spending much less on advertising. It’s in the air only on the six battlefields Trump won in 2016: Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Arizona.
Biden leads Trump in all of those states, according to Real Clear Politics poll averages, which also show the Democrat ahead of Trump in the four states that Trump campaign officials have seen as possible withdrawals: New Mexico , New Hampshire, Minnesota and New Hampshire.
Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale previously stated that the president’s political agenda is capable of attracting Latino voters in states like New Mexico, which has voted blue in all presidential cycles since 1992 and currently has a fully congressional delegation. democrat.
“Let’s go straight to Albuquerque,” Parscale told Trump at one point last summer, as POLITICO previously reported. The campaign finally held a rally in the Albuquerque suburbs last September.
Now it is Biden’s campaign that boasts.
“We are playing offense, buying shows like Fox News and NASCAR during the day to face a large volume of Obama / Trump voters,” the Biden campaign said in an internal memo obtained by POLITICO describing its ad purchases. .
Biden’s five-week, $ 15 million TV purchase is slated to be burned by the end of next week, according to the Democratic campaign. So far, she’s spent and reserved about half that amount, according to tracking firm Advertising Analytics.
Biden’s campaign is focusing on the one decisive state that Trump cannot afford to lose: his newly adopted Florida home state. The Trump campaign placed a massive $ 32 million drop buy this week. Other media purchases by the Trump campaign have underscored Biden’s reason for going after Panhandle voters: Last month’s campaign spent $ 205,000 on the Pensacola television market, which viewers share with Mobile, Ala. Conservative strongholds where Republican campaigns rarely feel the need to move on. air five months before Election Day.
“Right from the start we are establishing a presence in the Tampa, Orlando and Jacksonville markets,” the memo said, promising a “strong presence in the Panhandle to stand up to white working-class voters who moved from Obama in ‘ 12 to Trump in ’16 “.
In a sign of Trump’s struggles in Florida, the president on Thursday brought in his former Florida campaign repairman, Susie Wiles, who had been expelled by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for unknown reasons in September. At the time of his removal, a senior Trump aide predicted to POLITICO that he would return if Trump was in trouble.
With the November showdown between Trump and Biden still four months away, the president’s campaign maintains that voters, particularly on the toughest battlefields in the Midwest, will make their way closer to the election.
“For us, Michigan was a late move last time,” said the person close to the Trump campaign, who was also involved in the president’s efforts in 2016. “And I suspect that is what will happen this time.”
