Donald Trump has quietly wrapped up his presidential campaign in the states he had his eye on six weeks ago. Polls show that Kamala Harris’ entry into the presidential race has put her out of reach and narrowed her path to the White House.
The Republican presidential candidate’s campaign has shifted resources away from Minnesota, Virginia and New Hampshire — states Trump bragged he could win when Joe Biden was the Democratic nominee — to focus instead on a small number of crucial states.
Money is being pumped into the three “blue wall” states: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, all of which Biden won in 2020 and are seen as crucial to the outcome of the November election.
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Special attention is being paid to Pennsylvania, which has 19 electoral votes and where a new CNN poll shows Trump and Harris tied at 47% each.
Resources have also been transferred to the southern and southwestern Sun Belt states of North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona, where Trump previously held a healthy lead over Biden but that has shrunk since Harris replaced the US president at the top of the Democratic ticket.
Maga Inc., a Trump-backed Super Pac, recently spent $16 million on ads in North Carolina. Polls show Harris in a near-tie in a state where Democrats have won just one presidential election since 1980.
The tactical shift is a clear sign of how the dynamics of the election battle have changed since the Republican national convention in July, when euphoric Trump campaigners confidently talked of victories in Minnesota, Virginia and New Hampshire.
Democrats won all three votes in the recent presidential election, but Biden’s support showed signs of serious erosion after his disastrous debate performance in Atlanta in June, leading to optimistic Republican predictions that they would be “in the game” in November.
An internal Trump campaign memo before the debate suggested ways the former president could win Minnesota and Virginia — helped in part by the presence of independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose campaign was initially thought to pose a greater threat to Biden but conflicting polls changed Trump’s calculations.
As optimism mounted, Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, held a rally in Minnesota shortly after the Republican convention. At the same time, the campaign announced plans to open eight offices in the state and hire more staff.
Harris has since replaced Biden and chosen Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, helping her bolster local support, while Kennedy has suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump.
Harris’s rise has also sparked new enthusiasm among Democratic supporters, leading to a surge in popularity that has given her a small but consistent lead in national polls. There has also been a fundraising frenzy, with her campaign raising $540 million in August alone.
The predicted wave of new Trump appointments and positions in Minnesota appears not to have materialized, Axios reports.
In Virginia — the site of Vance’s first solo rally after becoming the nominee — Trump hasn’t held a rally in six weeks, and the campaign no longer cites memos claiming it can flip the state. The apparent slide down the priority list is a stark change from June 28, when the former president hosted a rally in Chesapeake, the day after his ultimately racially transformative debate with Biden.
The clearest evidence of the campaign’s turnaround came from New Hampshire, where a former Trump aide said this week that winning was no longer the goal.
Trump has not appeared there since winning the Republican primary in January and has not sent a major deputy since the spring, despite New Hampshire being identified by Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley after the June debate as one of the states Trump’s campaign was targeting to expand his electoral map.
Recent polls show Harris leading by no margin of error.
“This election is going to be won in those seven swing states,” Lou Gargiulo, Trump’s New Hampshire campaign co-chair, told Politico. “That’s where the effort has to be.”
