Donald Trump has quietly ended his presidential campaign in states he targeted just six weeks ago after polls showed Kamala Harris’ entry into the presidential race has put them out of reach and narrowed her path to the White House.
The Republican presidential nominee’s campaign has shifted resources away from Minnesota, Virginia and New Hampshire — states Trump boasted he won when Joe Biden was the Democratic nominee — to focus instead on a small number of battleground states.
Money is being poured into three “blue wall” states, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, all of which were Biden’s 2020 sweepstakes and considered vital to the outcome of the November election.
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Special attention is being paid to Pennsylvania, which has 19 Electoral College votes and where a new CNN poll shows Trump and Harris each at 47 percent.
Resources have also been shifted to states in the Sun Belt of the South and Southwest – namely North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona – where Trump used to have good leads over Biden, but have eroded since Harris replaced the US president at the top of the Democratic ticket. .
Maga Inc., a Trump-backed Super Pac, has recently spent $16 million on ads in North Carolina, as polls have shown Harris a close bet even in a state where Democrats have held the presidency just once since 1980.
The tactical shift is a graphic sign of how the dynamic of the race has shifted since the Republican National Convention in July, when euphoric Trump campaigners spoke confidently of winning Minnesota, Virginia and New Hampshire.
Democrats have backed all three in recent presidential elections, but Biden’s support showed signs of serious erosion after June’s disastrous debate in Atlanta, prompting rising Republican predictions that they would be “in the game” in November.
An internal Trump campaign memo even before the debate laid out ways the former president could carry Minnesota and Virginia — in part because of the presence of independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose campaign was initially thought to be more of a threat to Biden before the reverse vote. the evidence changed Trump’s calculations.
As optimism grew, Trump and running mate JD Vance held a rally in Minnesota shortly after the Republican convention, while the campaign said it plans to open eight offices and increase staff in the state.
Since then, Harris replaced Biden and picked Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as his running mate, helping him shore up local support, while Kennedy has suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump.
Harris’ rise has also reinvigorated Democratic supporters, leading to a surge in popularity that has propelled him to a small but consistent national poll and a fundraising victory that has seen his campaign raise $540 million in August alone.
Axios reports that the predicted rash of new Trump offices and workers in Minnesota doesn’t appear to have happened.
In Virginia, where Vance’s first solo rally since winning the ticket, Trump hasn’t held a rally in six weeks and the campaign has been shut down, citing memos that say it could flip the state. Its apparent slide down the priority list is a far cry from June 28, when the former president held a rally in Chesapeake, a day after finally changing the race with Biden.
The clearest evidence of the campaign’s shift in thinking has come from New Hampshire, which a former Trump campaign worker said this week he is 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, although Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley identified New Hampshire after the June debate as one of the states where the Trump campaign aimed to expand its electoral victory map.
Recent polls have shown Harris leading beyond the margin of error.
“This election is going to be won in these seven states,” Trump’s New Hampshire campaign chairman Lou Gargiulo told Politico. “It takes effort.”
