In every losing campaign's postmortem, the analysts insist that the candidate should have gone where he or she did not. There were many complaints about Vice President Al Gore spending time in California late in the race when he should have been stumping in Florida in 2000 and I'm sure everyone recalls that Hillary Clinton was excoriated for taking Wisconsin and Michigan for granted in 2016 by failing to hold events there in the closing days of the campaign. Certainly, it's a general rule of thumb that in close elections the candidates are supposed to live in the battleground states, especially in the final weeks to eke out every last vote in the Electoral College.
So why in the world is Donald Trump holding rallies in the blue enclaves of California, New York and Colorado during the month of October? As far as we can tell, the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada are all close and various combinations of those states will be required to get to 270 electoral votes. Yet, for obscure reasons, Trump will be wasting time in the final few weeks of the campaign in these other states.
