The Trump campaign is betting that it can ramp up turnout and swamp the votes in traditional Democratic strongholds
When President Donald Trump steps on stage for a campaign rally in Rio Rancho, New Mexico next week, even his own campaign staffers know he will be facing long odds. A Republican candidate for President hasn’t won the state since 2004, when George W. Bush beat John Kerry there by a margin of just 5,988 votes.
The broader bets, made very early in the election cycle, signify some defining characteristics of Trump’s 2020 effort. To win, Trump probably needs to come up with a different set of states than those that garnered 304 electoral college votes and carried him to the White House: public polls show his disapproval ratings swamp his approval numbers by at least 9 percentage points in his 2016 blue-to-red trifecta of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Not everyone is buying it. Trump’s sagging job approval ratings suggest to many political observers that the map-broadening is a reflection of a search for a long shot way back to the White House. Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist, says that the Trump campaign is right to be trying to get more voters to show up and to branch out into new territory. “There are reasons to compete in all these places,” Donovan tells TIME.
Not all the blue states are long shots like New Mexico. While the GOP hasn’t won Minnesota since Richard Nixon took the state during his landslide victory in 1972, Trump lost to Clinton there in 2016 by a slim 1.5 percentage points. The Trump campaign hired a full-time state director in June and saw an uptick in Republican voter registrations in recent months.
The decision to target states like New Mexico, is based on internal campaign analysis of trends and data, says Bill Stepien, a senior political advisor to the campaign. “It costs a lot of money to invest in infrastructure and set up a headquarters. The campaign wouldn’t be considering doing that if New Mexico wasn’t a place where the numbers could add up,” Stepien said.
There is a group of voters the campaign calls “2018 disengagers.” These are voters who enthusiastically turned out for Trump in 2016 but sat home during the mid-term elections in 2018. Campaign data indicates those voters have “a high propensity” for going to the polls when Trump is on the ballot, Trump’s strategists say. This has led them to argue that even in states where Democrats made headway in 2018, Trump could still bring out a lot of voters in 2020.
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