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On Thursday, former president Donald Trump attempted to — yet again — recalibrate his campaign, this time with a press conference at his property in Bedminster, New Jersey.
The appearance at his beloved golf course comes exactly one week after Trump tried to put the spotlight back on himself amid Vice President Kamala Harris’s surging poll numbers, with a press conference at his Florida home of Mar-a-Lago. He used the event to grumble over crowd sizes, at one point stating incorrectly that his speech before the January 6 riot at the Capitol had more attendees than Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington.
It’s noteworthy that both of these “press conferences” happened at his own properties — the safest of spaces for the former president.
In the last two weeks, only two of Trump’s major public appearances, his stops in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, have taken place in states where he’ll actually need to campaign, a curious choice given Harris’s continued momentum and aggressive campaign schedule in several key battlegrounds.
Last weekend, Trump held a rally in Montana, where he quickly proceeded to mock Senator Jon Tester, the incumbent Democrat running for re-election against Trump’s hand-selected candidate, Tim Sheehy, for having “the biggest stomach I have ever seen.”
It was a somewhat unorthdox campaign stop. Yes, the Montana senate race is an intensely personal one for Trump, not just because a Democrat holds a seat in a state he won, but because Tester, as the top Democrat on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, helped sink the nomination of Ronny Jackson, the former White House physician, to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs.
But while Tester is indeed in trouble and Republicans need to flip only one more seat after Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia announced his retirement, Trump’s decision to rally in Montana makes little sense for his own political fortune. Trump won Montana by more than 16 points in 2020, and he very likely will win it by a similar margin in November.
The same can be said of his visit this Saturday to Wilkes-Barre located in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. Trump largely won Pennsylvania in 2016 because he flipped white working-class areas like Luzerne, a historically Democratic county that he won by 20 points in 2016 and 14.4 points in 2020.
Trump might have needed to campaign in Wilkes-Barre had Harris picked Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro - who won Luzerne County in 2022 - as her running mate. But now he needs to cut into Democratic margins in the suburbs of Philadelphia like Bucks County, where Biden built on Hillary Clinton’s victory in 2020, or Erie County, which Trump won but Biden flipped.
Trump’s decision to hold an event in Asheville, North Carolina this week also made little sense. As a college town, Asheville is a decidedly liberal city.
But Asheville’s Buncombe County is surrounded by solidly red Madison County, where 61 percent of voters elected Trump; Yancey County, which Trump won 2-to-1; McDowell and Rutherford Counties, where he won almost three-quarters of the vote; Henderson County, where he won 58.7 percent of the vote; and Haywood County, where he won more than 60 percent of the vote.
By comparison, Harris is competing everywhere she needs to be. On Friday, she will travel to Raleigh, North Carolina, where she’ll need to fire up supporters if she’s to have any shot of turning the state blue.
Similarly, before she takes the stage at the Democratic National Convention a week from today, Harris will travel to Milwaukee, a must-win part of Wisconsin where Republicans held their convention last month. Harris’s campaign also announced this week that it would make a $90 million ad buy in places like Erie County; Toledo, Ohio; Alpena, Michigan; and Youngstown, Ohio.
Harris does not need to take these regions outright to win. But she can shave off the top of Trump’s margins.
Meanwhile, Harris is sending her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, to his native Nebraska this weekend. Nebraska is one of only two states that allocates its electoral votes by congressional district, so Walz will head to Nebraska’s 2nd district, specifically Omaha, in hopes of keeping “the blue dot” in the Democratic column after Biden won it in 2020.
Essentially, Harris is campaigning like a candidate who wants to win, doing multiple events a week in places she must flip, hold or overperform. Trump, by contrast, is essentially doing what he accused Biden of during the 2020 presidential election: camping out in his basement.
