Donald Trump has quietly wound down his presidential campaign in states he was targeting just six weeks ago amid polling evidence showing that Kamala Harris’s entry into the presidential race has put them out of reach and narrowed his path to the White House.
The Republican presidential nominee’s campaign has diverted resources away from Minnesota, Virginia and New Hampshire – states Trump was boasting he could win while Joe Biden was the Democratic candidate – to focus instead on a small number of battleground states.
Money is being poured into the three “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, which were all carried by Biden in 2020 and are seen as vital to the outcome of November’s election.
Special attention is being paid to Pennsylvania, which has 19 electoral college votes, and where a new CNN poll shows Trump and Harris tied at 47% each.
Resources have also been transferred to southern and south-western Sun belt states – namely North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona – where Trump previously had healthy leads over Biden that have been whittled away since Harris replaced the US president at the top of the Democratic ticket.
Maga Inc, a Trump-supporting Super Pac, has recently spent $16m in adverts in North Carolina as polls have shown Harris close to drawing even in a state the Democrats carried just once in presidential elections since 1980.
The tactical shift is a graphic sign of how the dynamics of the electoral contest have shifted since the Republican national convention in July, when euphoric Trump campaigners talked confidently of winning Minnesota, Virginia and New Hampshire.
Democrats have carried all three in recent presidential polls but Biden’s support showed signs of serious erosion following June’s calamitous debate performance in Atlanta – prompting bullish Republican forecasts that they would be “in play” in November.
An internal Trump campaign memo even before the debate posited ways that the former president could carry Minnesota and Virginia – partly helped by the presence of the independent candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr, whose campaign was initially thought to pose a greater threat to Biden before contrary polling evidence changed Trump’s calculus.
As optimism surged, Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, held a rally in Minnesota shortly after the Republican convention, while the campaign said it planned to open eight offices in the state and build up staff.
Since then, Harris replaced Biden and chose the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, as her running mate – helping her to shore up local support – while Kennedy has suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump.
Harris’s ascent has also infused the Democrats’ supporters with fresh enthusiasm, leading to a surge in popularity that has propelled her into a small but consistent national poll lead and a fundraising bonanza that saw her campaign raise $540m in August alone.
The predicted rash of new Trump offices and hires in Minnesota appears not to have happened, Axios reported.
In Virginia – the site of Vance’s first solo rally after being appointed to the ticket – Trump has not staged a rally for six weeks and the campaign has stopped citing memos claiming it can flip the state. Its apparent slide down the priority list is a far cry from 28 June, when the former president staged a rally in Chesapeake a day after his ultimately race-changing debate with Biden.
The clearest evidence of the switch in campaign’s thinking has come in New Hampshire, which a former Trump field worker said this week that it was no longer trying to win.
Trump has not appeared there since winning the Republican primary in January and has not sent a major surrogate since the spring, despite New Hampshire being identified by Michael Whatley, chair of the Republican National Committee, after the June debate as one of the states the Trump campaign was targeting to expand its electoral wining map.
Recent polls have shown Harris leading outside the margin of error.
“This election is going to be won in those seven swing states,” Lou Gargiulo, the co-chair of Trump’s campaign in New Hampshire, told Politico. “That’s where the effort’s got to be put.”
