California dreaming: Why Trump is flirting with blue states

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Former President Donald Trump has raised eyebrows with his decision to hold campaign rallies deep in Democratic territory, including appearances in Coachella Valley, California, and Madison Square Garden in New York City.

Yet it is not the first time Trump has paid attention to the blue states outside of the highly competitive Rust Belt, the region that, for him, was the difference between victory in 2016 and defeat in 2020. Trump’s embrace of SALT deductions, undoing his own handiwork from the 2017 tax law, is an overture to New Yorkers and Californians.

Candidate time is a valuable commodity, so why is Trump spending time worrying about voters in states he has no chance of carrying this year as the presidential campaign enters its final weeks? The Republican nominee risks repeating the mistake of his 2016 rival Hillary Clinton, who should have spent more time in Wisconsin, and Richard Nixon, who wasted time in a close race by fulfilling his promise to visit all 50 states ahead of the 1960 election.

But there are at least 10 competitive House races in California and New York. The path to the current razor-thin Republican House majority two years ago ran through these two blue states. Trump wants Republicans to retain control of the House. Not only would this help him govern if elected, but it is possible a Democratic majority in the House would try to impeach him as early as Inauguration Day.

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The second thing turning out blue-state Republicans could do is help him win the popular vote. Clinton and President Joe Biden won the popular vote largely by running up the score in California and New York. Trump can’t win their electoral votes, but perhaps he can chip away at the Democrats’ support.

This wasn’t even a consideration in 2020, when Trump’s reelection campaign focused almost exclusively on the battleground states and the Electoral College majority. Even as Trump has at times tied or led the Democratic nominee in national polls this time around, the Atlantic’s Tim Alberta wrote, “Trump’s team doesn’t need to execute a national campaign.” He quoted a former Republican presidential campaign adviser as saying they were “basically running four or five Senate races” with their emphasis on the most competitive swing states.

Nevertheless, a new Pew Research Center poll with a large sample size has Trump within the margin of error of Vice President Kamala Harris nationally, taking 47% of the vote to her 48%. She is behind where Biden and Clinton were at this point in the race. In the national RealClearPolitics polling average as of Oct. 10 in their respective election years, Biden was up by 10, Clinton was up by 5.8, and Harris is leading by 1.8. Moreover, there are persistent rumblings that well-funded Democratic internal polling looks worse for Harris and friends.

Democrats are still hoping that this year won’t be like 2016 or 2020, when Trump outperformed his final poll numbers both times. They want it to end up like the 2022 midterm elections, where blue states moved right (but not enough for Republicans to actually win them) and red-state, rural turnout surged (although Republicans were going to win in those areas anyway) but there was little movement in the GOP’s favor in the purple states. This, along with lower-propensity Trump voters staying home without him on the ballot, was why there was no red wave despite what looked like a highly favorable national environment for Republicans.

Maybe this will happen again, though there are a number of battleground polls that show Trump competitive in purple states, including the Rust Belt states that weren’t purple until the former president made them competitive again in his first campaign. Mitt Romney’s allies were confident in 2012 that then-President Barack Obama wouldn’t be able to turn out the lower-propensity voters in his coalition a second time, and their Election Day ended in disappointment.

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If Trump and House Republicans rise together, these blue-state excursions will look prescient. If he narrowly loses in the battleground states that might have been a better use of his precious time, the autopsies of his campaign will second-guess the need for a Madison Square Garden rally in late October.

It’s going to be a long 24 days until Election Day.

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