CNN
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On the last Saturday in July, with the presidential election in flux after a month of unimaginable turmoil, Donald Trump looked out at an overflow crowd in St. Cloud, Minnesota, and predicted he could accomplish something that had eluded any Republican presidential candidate in nearly half a century.
“If we run an honest election, I would win Minnesota in a landslide victory,” the former president said.
But since that bold declaration, Trump hasn’t been back to Minnesota, nor has his running mate, J.D. Vance, who was onstage with him that night. Minnesotans haven’t seen any of Trump’s campaign ads on television recently, and they probably won’t this fall.
Trump and his advisers once envisioned an ambitious electoral map that would have given Republicans a broader path to the White House through states that lean heavily Democratic in presidential elections. Surrounded by donors at his Mar-a-Lago club, Trump announced plans to run in Minnesota and Virginia in May. His campaign has set up offices in New Hampshire and even held a rally on the Jersey Shore.
But the final stretch of the race for the White House is likely to be fought on more familiar ground: The Trump campaign and its allies have earmarked about $160 million in airtime this fall, nearly all of it planned for Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona, states that were crucial to the 2020 election.
The campaign schedule has been similarly scaled back: Following the St. Cloud rally, Trump’s rallies and Vance’s public appearances have all taken place in seven battleground states in the Midwest and Sun Belt. Trump’s plans for the next two days follow that pattern, with a rally with police in North Carolina on Friday (the same day the first ballots are scheduled to begin distribution) and a rally in central Wisconsin on Saturday.
Trump’s retreat from historically Democratic strongholds reflects a political landscape reshaped by the intensifying race for the Democratic nomination and the explosion of support for Vice President Kamala Harris, who raised more than double what Trump did in August, a campaign official said Friday. Trump’s top advisers, who once suggested a landslide Electoral College victory was within reach when he was up against President Joe Biden, have since been running the campaign as if they expect a close contest with Harris.
The campaign has insisted it continues to compete in precincts outside of the 2020 districts. It has 11 offices in Virginia and eight in Minnesota that have been open since late spring, according to a person familiar with the campaign there, as well as New Hampshire, where Biden won all three by at least 7 points in 2020.
“The seven battleground states have always been our focus, and we remain aggressive in these non-traditional battleground states,” Trump spokeswoman Caroline Leavitt said. “Our view of the maps has not changed, and Democrats remain on the defensive, as evidenced by Kamala’s post-Labor Day visit to Democratic-leaning New Hampshire.”
Leavitt’s views are not necessarily shared by Republicans in states that have received less attention from the Trump campaign. A senior New England campaign volunteer wrote in an email to supporters that internal polls suggest Trump will lose New Hampshire by a larger margin than he did in 2020, and that advisers have determined the state is “no longer a battleground state.”
The campaign later barred the volunteer, a former Massachusetts Republican Party official, from future involvement.Trump, who came close to winning New Hampshire by 3,000 votes in 2016, announced his commitment to the state on Wednesday.
“We really want to win New Hampshire,” he told a Pennsylvania audience at a town hall meeting broadcast on Fox News.
But on the ground, the picture is very different, said Mike Dennehy, a longtime strategist in the state who has advised past presidential candidates there.
“When Joe Biden was on the campaign trail, I thought Trump had a good chance of winning New Hampshire,” Dennehy said. “If the election were held today, I think Trump would lose by 6 to 8 points.”
Former Minnesota Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch has similar concerns about Trump’s performance in the state. Trump came 1.5 percentage points away from winning Minnesota in 2016, the closest margin of victory since Ronald Reagan’s reelection campaign nearly flipped the state to the Republicans. Trump vowed never to return after his 2020 loss, but he visited the state several times earlier this year and Koch believed Trump was poised to become the first Republican to win the state since President Richard Nixon.
But Koch, who now advises Republican candidates in the state, said Harris’ momentum, combined with the popularity of her new running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, makes Minnesota “a very tough place for Trump.”
“I’ve warned all my buddies on the West Coast and the East Coast: Get ready for Waltz,” Koch said. “They don’t know how to handle the real Midwestern, ‘Oh, what a shame.'”
A Trump campaign adviser, speaking on condition of anonymity to speak candidly about the plans, told CNN that he believes early efforts in Minnesota and Virginia have forced the Harris campaign to spend resources to defend traditionally Democratic areas. The Harris campaign has opened 24 campaign offices in Virginia, drafted its vice presidential running mate out of Minnesota and held an event in New Hampshire on Wednesday.
“We see that as a good thing,” the adviser said.
Still, in Trump’s third presidential campaign, his 2020 defeat is often a guide, rather than the trajectory of his 2016 victory.
Take the state of Nebraska, for example.
Along with Maine, Nebraska is one of two states that split their Electoral College votes by congressional district rather than following statewide winner-take-all rules. Trump won the battleground district around Omaha in 2016 but lost decisively to Biden in 2020.
This time around, Harris has put far more money into the fight for Nebraska’s vast 2nd Congressional District than Trump, spending about $1 million on advertising compared with just over $5,000 for Trump and Republican groups.
The result was a flood of ads for Harris and very few television appearances for Trump.
Among the hottest battleground states, the Trump campaign is prioritizing some over others.
Republicans are matching Democrats in spending in Pennsylvania, with both sides locking in more than $70 million in airtime there this fall, and in Georgia, where both parties are spending nearly $40 million in the final nine weeks of the campaign.
Elsewhere, Democrats are poised to far outspend Trump, getting twice as much airtime in Michigan, three times as much in Wisconsin and nearly four times as much in Arizona. In Nevada, where Trump has campaigned heavily, Republicans are spending only about $1.4 million on fall ads, while Democrats are spending $24 million to boost Harris.
Amy Tarkanian, a former Nevada Republican Party chairwoman, told CNN that Trump and Republicans have struggled in the state because of overwhelming support for abortion rights and a state party that prioritizes loyalty to the former president over winning the election.
“The results are clear,” she said.
The escalating battle for Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes is a stark illustration of the rising stakes for both candidates: Trump’s path to victory has narrowed since the summer, but Harris’ chances of winning the White House decline dramatically if she doesn’t win Pennsylvania.
“Either side knows what’s going to happen, but both sides know this is the only way forward,” said David Urban, a veteran Republican strategist who worked on Trump’s 2020 campaign in the Keystone State. “I don’t think you can be president if you don’t win.”
The Trump campaign also plans to step up efforts to retake Georgia, a state that Biden reclaimed in 2020 but had seemed to slip away from him, and which both campaigns see as a hotbed of contention again with Harris in the lead.
Trump advisers said the campaign has emphasized the importance of the state to the former president, who has sought to ease long-standing tensions with Republican Gov. Brian Kemp that date back to the popular governor’s refusal to intervene in the certification of the state’s 2020 election results.
Just last month, President Trump criticized Kemp and his wife at a rally in Atlanta, though the former president recently extended a reconciliation.
A source familiar with the matter told CNN that Kemp may attend Trump fundraisers and other campaign events afterward, but has no immediate plans to do so. Kemp’s political organization is now working closely with the former president’s team amid growing concerns about the Trump campaign’s ground operation in Georgia.
“I appreciate your help and support in Georgia,” Trump recently posted on social media. “A victory in Georgia is critical to the success of our party and, most importantly, our country.”
CNN’s Jeff Zeleny, David Wright and Betsy Klein contributed to this report.