Trump campaign sees a narrow path to victory in final days – and senses another upset

President Donald Trump’s campaign sees a narrow yet achievable path to victory entering Election Day, despite polling that shows he remains on defense in a number of states that he won comfortably four years ago.

The president’s campaign had hoped to broaden his winning map from 2016 by adding to the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House with states he barely lost that year, such as Minnesota, New Hampshire and Nevada. But states that he won last time, including Wisconsin and Michigan, have become hostile terrain, increasing the importance for victory in a handful of must-win states.

Despite the worsening odds in all of these battlegrounds and polls that show a tight race in Iowa and Georgia, Trump and his team have not abandoned a single one. They are dividing the president’s time and resources between a dozen states in the campaign’s closing days, including Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida — four states that if lost would mean a struggle to keep the White House.

Senior officials and surrogates see evidence in voter registration trends and crowds at their campaign stops that Nov. 3 will be a repeat of Trump’s upset victory in 2016.

“You can’t dispute the turnouts, you can’t dispute the fact that all of us around the country are working hard and we’re seeing the same things no matter if we’re in Arizona, Michigan, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Nevada,” Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law and a senior campaign adviser, told McClatchy. “It feels like the enthusiasm, the energy, and the momentum is solidly behind the president.”

While Trump aides say that enthusiasm for the president, and a relative lack of excitement for the Democratic nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, will boost turnout for Trump on Election Day throughout the country, they are fixed on the core states rich with electors that public and private polling suggest are within their grasp.

Trump’s campaign is especially concerned that the upper-Midwest states that supported him in 2016 will shift back toward Democrats. They scheduled rallies in the three days before Election Day in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Florida.

GOP pollster Neil Newhouse, a co-founder of Public Opinion Strategies, said that the Trump campaign has “no other choice” but to spend the final weekend in multiple states a day.

“They need to spend the time in the states that are the tipping-point states, and there are other states that are on the bubble that they really can’t spend as much time in. They’ve got to basically depend on their ground game to pull them through there,” Newhouse said.

“And that’s why the president is spending time in Pennsylvania, in Michigan, in Wisconsin. Those are states that they need to turn in order to win,” he said.

The president’s team expects to have a relatively clear understanding early on election night whether the race will be close — or contested — based on East Coast time zone returns from states that Trump must win: Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida.

If he can hold onto those four states, he can then afford to lose some of the states that appear to be slipping away from him in the Midwest and the Southwest — Arizona, Wisconsin and Michigan. The path to win requires he avoid surprise Democratic victories in states like Texas or Georgia or counter with unexpected upsets in places like New Hampshire, Minnesota and Nevada.

Strategists see little margin for error, with Trump at best securing just over the requisite 270 Electoral College votes.

“The president won a relatively narrow victory in 2016 while losing the popular vote, and always sort of struggled to make the case for where they could expand that map in 2020,” said Michael Steel, longtime press secretary to former Republican House Speaker John Boehner.

“But based on the president’s travel, and where they’ve spent money,” Steel continued, “they are playing defense in states where they shouldn’t have a problem.”

HOLD MUST-WIN STATES

According to public polling, the most competitive battleground states — Ohio, Florida, North Carolina and Pennsylvania — are also the four swing states with the greatest number of electors.

Trump’s failure to secure all of these critical states would leave him with few pathways to victory. But even winning all four would require him to also hold onto Arizona, Iowa and Georgia.

Trump won those four battlegrounds in 2016, and promising Republican voter registration numbers also offer his campaign hope that Election Day turnout in those key states could put the president over the top once again.

Nick Trainer, director of battleground strategy for the Trump campaign, said he expects 85-90% of the president’s supporters in Pennsylvania to vote in-person on Nov. 3. Pennsylvania sends 20 electors to vote for president.

“Pennsylvania is a place where we know who our voters are, we know how to get them to vote, and we know that they’re going to vote on Election Day,” Trainer told McClatchy.

Trump campaign officials believe that preliminary voting data in North Carolina, which has 15 electors, holds promising signs for the president.

“In North Carolina we regularly see really good data coming back,” Trainer said. “President Trump has broadened his coalition in North Carolina with African Americans, specifically with African American men — which will be icing on the cake when he wins the state.”

The race for Florida’s 29 electors once again appears highly competitive, with Biden and Trump polling tied or within the margin of error.

“If we win Florida, it’s all over,” a Biden campaign official said. “That said, Florida is Florida, and our strategy has always been to meet every voter where they are.”

Ohio, which has 18 electors, was not even considered competitive in 2016, and Biden’s ability to close the gap with Trump there in recent polls has forced the president’s campaign to schedule last-minute visits and advertising in the expansive state.

Trump also had to spend time and money on television advertising in Georgia and Iowa, two states he won comfortably four years ago but is in a statistical dead heat with Biden now.

Republicans believe that the early investment they made in those two states, which have 16 and 6 electoral votes respectively, will pay off in the home stretch with late deciders and people who do not vote in every election.

“When you look at the ground game and what we already put in place early, the recognition that that’s something you can’t just pop up a week before the election, it’s an investment that is made a year in advance, sometimes years in advance in terms of the states that we’ve been in,” said Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, denying that the campaign had stretched itself too thin.

SURVIVE RUST BELT LOSSES

Polling and mail-in and early voting numbers indicate that suburban counties across the Rust Belt are voting at high numbers, giving Democrats hope that they have run up the ballot score well enough before Election Day.

Trump can afford to lose Michigan and Wisconsin — two states that appear to be slipping out of his reach, according to public and private polling — alternatively, he can lose Pennsylvania if he manages to win Michigan in its place. Michigan has 16 electors and Wisconsin has ten.

But Trump losses in Michigan and Wisconsin will ensure a highly competitive race that requires him to win every other state he won in 2016 or add a new state to his roster.

That reality has driven the Trump campaign to spend precious time in the home stretch in Nevada, which has six electoral votes, and New Hampshire, which has four, in case Trump loses Pennsylvania and Michigan yet pulls out a win in Wisconsin.

Trump’s campaign last week announced a $6 million TV ad buy that senior adviser Jason Miller told reporters focused largely on Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, but also included Minnesota.

The RNC has also stepped in to help in Wisconsin and Michigan as part of a $55 million coordinated advertising effort with the Trump campaign. The joint ads are also running in Arizona, Iowa and North Carolina.

Trump’s campaign initially pulled down television advertising in Iowa and Ohio in early October, after its cash on hand dropped to $63.1 million, but it went back on the air at the end of the month in the Midwestern states that have drawn concern over Biden’s rise in the polls.

Biden and his allies purchased roughly $110 million in television ads from Oct. 27 through Nov. 3, which is almost double the nearly $59 million that Trump and his allies spent in the same period in the 16 states where one or both camps had commercials on the air, according to national GOP media purchasing firm Medium Buying.

Nicholas Everhart, an Ohio-based Republican who tracks spending on political advertising and founded Medium Buying, said the advertising strategy is reflective of the large number of states that Trump has to defend and his dwindling financial resources.

“You do everything when you have the money to do it, but you make hard choices and you strategically cut back, reallocate, when you don’t in politics. And right now we’re just seeing a campaign on the Biden side that has the money to play and do almost all the things offensively and defensively they feel like they need to do on a television advertising level,” he said. “And the president’s campaign just doesn’t.”

Trump has so far opted not to contribute money from his personal fortune to increase his options, unlike four years ago, when on the final weekend of the election he wrote a $10 million personal check to the campaign.

“We’re very smart with our money. We don’t frivolously spend it, and we don’t need to have the president cut a personal check. That’s unnecessary,” Lara Trump said.

AVOID SUN BELT UPSETS

Trump’s first line of defense is a group of Sun Belt states he won by three-and-a-half percentage points or more four years ago. Yet warning signs also point to trouble for Trump in that region.

Arizona and its 11 electors offer Trump another opportunity to make up for losses elsewhere.

That state is trending toward Biden in public polling, aided by a popular Democratic candidate for Senate, former astronaut and retired Navy pilot Captain Mark Kelly, who is seeking to defeat Republican Sen. Martha McSally, who was appointed to fill the seat.

Losing Arizona would narrow Trump’s path even further. And even if he were to win the state again, the president must then avoid upsets in Georgia and Texas in order to maintain his most viable paths for winning the election.

Biden campaigned in Atlanta recently, while his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, went to Texas for an event that was the highest-level campaign stop in Texas from either side in the closing days.

Harold Cook, former executive director of the Texas Democratic Party, said in an interview that he expects the margin of victory in Texas this year “to stay between two percentage points, maybe three.”

“Even in the polls that have Trump ahead, it’s not by more than a couple percentage points, so if the pattern holds true then it’ll be a very close race — and it would not completely surprise me if Biden won Texas,” Cook said.

The Trump campaign has been dismissive of Democratic efforts to deliver the 38 electors from Texas for Biden. But it has taken threats to its hold on Georgia’s 16 electors more seriously.

Georgia and Arizona have not voted for a Democrat for president since the 1990s, and Texas has gone for every Republican candidate since 1976.

“Texas has never been in play this entire cycle. It is in play for House races, and obviously at the state legislative level, but statewide, Texas is a Republican state and will be once again,” the Trump campaign’s Trainer said.

Even in these states, the president is on defense, reflective of the troubled path he has before him to victory.

“We are in a new position of defending states that we haven’t had to defend as a Republican Party in 35 years,” Bill Stepien, Trump’s campaign manager, acknowledged to reporters.

But he dismissed Biden’s play for Georgia. “I invite Joe Biden to expend his limited campaign travel on states he’s not going to win in 2020.”