Donald Trump is quietly scaling back his presidential campaign in states he targeted just six weeks ago, as polls show Kamala Harris’ entry into the race has put them out of reach and narrowed his path to the White House.
The Republican presidential candidate’s campaign has diverted money from Minnesota, Virginia and New Hampshire, states where Trump had boasted that Democratic candidate Joe Biden could win, to focus on a handful of battleground states.
Money is pouring into three “blue wall” states – Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – all of which were won by Biden in the 2020 presidential election and are seen as crucial to the outcome in November.
Particular attention is being paid to Pennsylvania, which has 19 electoral votes, with Trump and Harris tied at 47% support each in the latest CNN poll.
Resources are also being shifted to the Sunbelt states of the South and Southwest, specifically North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona, where Trump previously held a large lead over Biden but whose lead has shrunk since Harris took over as the US president and became the top Democratic candidate.
MAGA, a pro-Trump super PAC, recently spent $16 million on advertising in North Carolina after polls showed Harris in a close race in a state that has been won only once by a Democrat in a presidential election since 1980.
The tactical shift is a stark sign of how the dynamics of the race have shifted since July’s Republican National Convention, when Trump’s campaign confidently said it would win Minnesota, Virginia and New Hampshire.
While recent presidential polls have shown Democrats winning all three candidates, there are signs that Biden’s support has dropped significantly following his dismal performance in the Atlanta debate in June, and Republicans are bullish on Biden’s chances of “favoring” the November debates.
Even before the debate, internal Trump campaign memos had laid out how the former president could win Minnesota and Virginia, in part thanks to the presence of independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose campaign was initially thought to pose a bigger threat to Biden, but polling results reversed that, changing Trump’s calculations.
Amid growing optimism, Mr. Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, held a rally in Minnesota shortly after the Republican National Convention and announced that the campaign planned to open eight offices in the state and add staff.
Since then, Harris has replaced Biden in choosing Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, helping to shore up her support in the state, while Kennedy has suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump.
Ms. Harris’s rise has also infused new enthusiasm among Democrats, spurring a popularity surge as she maintains small but consistent leads in national polls and raked in a huge amount of money for her campaign, raising $540 million in August alone.
Axios reported that Trump’s new office and job surge in Minnesota appears to have not panned out as expected.
Virginia was the site of Vance’s first solo rally since being nominated, but Trump hasn’t held a rally there in six weeks and his campaign has stopped citing memos claiming they could flip the state — an apparent drop in priority from June 28, when he held a rally in Chesapeake, the day after his ultimately racially charged debate with Biden.
The clearest evidence of the campaign’s shift in thinking came in New Hampshire, where a former Trump field staffer said this week they were no longer aiming to win.
Trump has not been seen in New Hampshire since winning the Republican primary in January and has not sent a major surrogate there since the spring, even though Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley named the state after the June debate as one of the states the Trump campaign was targeting to widen its electoral victory map.
Recent polls show Harris leading within the margin of error.
“This election is going to be decided in these seven battleground states,” Lou Gargiulo, co-chairman of the Trump New Hampshire campaign, told Politico. “That’s where we need to focus our efforts.”