Donald Trump's campaign map has shrunk dramatically since Kamala Harris took over the Democratic ticket.
The former president and his advisers once envisioned an ambitious electoral map that provided paths to the White House through Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey and Virginia, but nearly all of his TV advertising budget is concentrated on the same states that were crucial to the 2020 election – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, reported CNN.
"All of Trump’s rallies and Vance’s public appearances [since the end of July] have come in those seven Midwest and Sun Belt battlegrounds," the network reported. "Trump’s plans over the next two days follow that pattern: an event with police Friday in North Carolina, where the first ballots have been scheduled to start going out that day, and a rally in the middle of Wisconsin on Saturday."
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Harris more than doubled Trump's fundraising haul last month, her campaign aides say, and the GOP nominee's campaign has seemingly shifted their strategy to battling in those swing states rather than expanding their map, although they insist that was their strategy all along.
“The seven battleground states have always been our focus and we are still maintaining an offensive posture in these nontraditional battleground states,” said Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt. “Nothing has changed as far as how we view the map, and the Democrats are still playing on defense, as evidenced by Kamala’s post-Labor Day visit to blue New Hampshire.”
However, Republicans in the states that Trump has abandoned say that polling shows he's on track to lose those states even worse than he did in 2020.
“When Joe Biden was in the race, at that point, I actually thought it was a likely scenario that Trump would win New Hampshire,” said Mike Dennehy, a longtime political strategist from the Granite State. “If the election were held today, Trump would lose by 6 to 8 points.”
Trump campaign in Minnesota shortly after the president ended his campaign and turned it over to Harris, but that's the last event he's held in a Democratic-leaning state since then, and the vice president's choice of Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate has seemingly shut the door on his chances of winning there.
“I warned all my West and East Coast buddies: you better be ready for Walz,” said Amy Koch, a former Minnesota state Senate majority leader who now advises GOP candidates. “They don’t know how to deal with that kind of Midwest ‘aw shucks’ authenticity.”
However, a Trump campaign adviser insists those early efforts in states they've since abandoned forced the Harris campaign to spend money on states Democrats have traditionally won.
“We view that as a good thing,” the adviser said.
Republicans have matched Democratic spending in Pennsylvania, which is viewed as possibly the most crucial state in the election, and in Georgia, but Democrats have reserved twice as much airtime in Michigan, three times in Wisconsin and nearly four times in Arizona, and their spending in Nevada has dwarfed the GOP's.
“The writing is on the wall,” said Amy Tarkanian, a former chairwoman of the Nevada GOP.
