Trump said he was expanding the battleground map. His campaign spending suggests otherwise

By Steve Contorno and Kristen Holmes, CNN

(CNN) — On the last Saturday of July, with the presidential race in flux from an unthinkable month of turmoil, Donald Trump looked out at an overflowing St. Cloud, Minnesota, crowd and predicted he could accomplish what no Republican presidential candidate had managed in nearly half a century.

“I’m telling you, if we have an honest election, we’re going to blow it out in Minnesota,” the former president said.

But since that bold declaration, Trump hasn’t returned to the Gopher State. His running mate JD Vance, on stage with him that evening, hasn’t either. Nor have Minnesotans seen Trump campaign ads on their televisions recently, and they likely won’t this fall.

Trump and his advisers once envisioned an ambitious electoral map that would take the presidential race through blue-tinted states and provide the Republican nominee more paths to the White House. In May, surrounded by donors at his Mar-a-Lago club, Trump presented his plans to compete for Minnesota and Virginia. His campaign maintained an office in New Hampshire and even held a rally on the Jersey Shore.

The final stretch of the race for the White House, though, is setting up to be fought over much more familiar ground. Trump’s campaign and his allies have reserved about $160 million in airtime this fall with nearly all of it planned for the same states that proved pivotal in the 2020 election: Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona.

The campaign’s calendar has similarly narrowed. Following the St. Cloud event, all of Trump’s rallies and Vance’s public appearances have come in those seven Midwest and Sun Belt battlegrounds. Trump’s plans over the next two days follow that pattern: an event with police Friday in North Carolina, where the first ballots have been scheduled to start going out that day, and a rally in the middle of Wisconsin on Saturday.

Trump’s pull back from historically blue turf is reflective of a tightening race and a political landscape remade in the aftermath of the Democratic ticket shakeup and the burst of enthusiasm for Vice President Kamala Harris. The vice president more than doubled Trump’s August fundraising haul, her campaign aides announced Friday. Trump’s top advisers, who once suggested an Electoral College landslide was within reach when their opponent was President Joe Biden, have since steered the campaign as though they expect a photo finish against Harris.

The campaign maintains they continue to compete outside of the 2020 map. A person with knowledge of the ground game said there are 11 offices in Virginia and eight in Minnesota that have remained open since late spring, as does the New Hampshire space. Biden carried all three states by at least 7 points in 2020.

“The seven battleground states have always been our focus and we are still maintaining an offensive posture in these nontraditional battleground states,” Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said. “Nothing has changed as far as how we view the map, and the Democrats are still playing on defense, as evidenced by Kamala’s post-Labor Day visit to blue New Hampshire.”

Blue state Republicans don’t see Trump competing there

Leavitt’s sentiments are not universally shared by Republicans in states that are no longer getting as much attention from Trump’s team. A top campaign volunteer in New England told supporters in an email that internal polling showed Trump on track to lose New Hampshire by a larger margin than his 2020 defeat and his advisers had determined it was “no longer a battleground state.”

The campaign has since barred the volunteer, a former top operative for the Massachusetts GOP, from future involvement. Trump, who came within 3,000 votes of winning New Hampshire in 2016, voiced his commitment to the state on Wednesday.

“We really want to win New Hampshire,” he told a Pennsylvania crowd during a town hall that aired on Fox News.

The view from the ground, though, looks much different, said Mike Dennehy, a longtime strategist in the Granite State who has advised past presidential candidates there.

“When Joe Biden was in the race, at that point, I actually thought it was a likely scenario that Trump would win New Hampshire,” Dennehy said. “If the election were held today, Trump would lose by 6 to 8 points.”

Amy Koch, a former Minnesota state Senate majority leader, has similar concerns about Trump’s trajectory in her state. Trump came within 1.5 points of winning Minnesota in 2016, the closest margin since Ronald Reagan’s reelection campaign came within a razor’s edge of flipping the state red. Though Trump vowed never to return after losing it in 2020, he made several stops to Minnesota earlier this year and Koch thought he was positioning himself to become the first Republican since President Richard Nixon to win the state.

But Koch, who now advises Republican candidates in the state, said the Harris momentum – coupled with the popularity of her new running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz – has made the Gopher State “very, very difficult for the Trump folks.”

“I warned all my West and East Coast buddies: you better be ready for Walz,” Koch said. “They don’t know how to deal with that kind of midwest ‘aw shucks’ authenticity.”

A Trump campaign adviser who requested anonymity to speak openly about the planning told CNN that they believe their early efforts in states like Minnesota and Virginia have forced the Harris campaign to spend resources defending traditionally Democratic turf. Harris has opened two dozen campaign offices in Virginia, plucked her running mate out of Minnesota and held an event in New Hampshire on Wednesday.

“We view that as a good thing,” the adviser said.

Still, in his third presidential campaign, Trump’s 2020 defeat is often serving as more of a guide than his winning path in 2016.

Take, for example, Nebraska.

Along with Maine, Nebraska is one of two states that divide Electoral College votes by congressional district, rather than following statewide, winner-take-all rules. Trump carried the swing district surrounding Omaha in 2016, but decisively lost it to Biden in 2020.

This time, Harris is investing far more resources than Trump in the fight for Nebraska’s sprawling 2nd District, spending about $1 million on advertising compared to a little more than $5,000 by Trump and Republican groups.

The result is a flood of ads from Harris and a near absence from Trump on television.

Fall TV reservations underscore campaigns’ focus

Even within the most competitive battleground states, Trump’s campaign has prioritized some over others.

Republicans have matched Democrats dollar for dollar in Pennsylvania, with both sides reserving more than $70 million in airtime there this fall. The same goes for Georgia, where the two parties have purchased nearly $40 million for the final nine weeks of the race.

Elsewhere, Democrats are poised to far outspend the Trump campaign. Democrats have reserved twice as much airtime in Michigan, three times in Wisconsin and nearly four times in Arizona. In Nevada, where Trump has campaigned aggressively, Republicans have only committed about $1.4 million in fall advertising while Democrats are spending $24 million to boost Harris.

Amy Tarkanian, a former chairwoman of the Nevada GOP, told CNN that Trump and Republicans face an uphill climb there due to the overwhelming support for abortion rights and a state party that has prioritized fealty to the former president over winning elections.

“The writing is on the wall,” she said.

The intensifying fight for Pennsylvania’s 19 Electoral College votes is illustrative of the mounting stakes for both candidates there. While Trump’s paths to victory have narrowed since the summer, Harris’ chances of capturing the White House diminish dramatically without Pennsylvania in her column.

“Neither side can tell what’s going to happen but both sides know it’s the only path forward,” said David Urban, a veteran Keystone State GOP strategist who worked on Trump’s 2020 campaign there. “If you don’t win it, I don’t think you get to be the president.”

The Trump campaign also plans to ramp up its efforts to win back Georgia, a state Biden flipped in 2020 that appeared to be slipping away from him. Both sides view it as back in play with Harris leading the ticket.

The Trump adviser said the campaign has stressed the importance of the state to the former president. In response, Trump has sought to smooth over years of tension with GOP Gov. Brian Kemp dating back to the popular governor’s refusal to intervene in the certification of the state’s 2020 election results.

As recently as last month, Trump criticized Kemp and his wife during a rally in Atlanta, but the former president recently extended an olive branch.

Kemp has since attended a fundraiser for Trump and may join other campaign events, sources familiar with the matter told CNN, though nothing is lined up for the immediate future. Amid concerns about the Trump campaign’s ground operation in Georgia, Kemp’s political machine is now working closely with the former president’s team.

“Thank you to #BrianKempGA for all of your help and support in Georgia,” Trump recently posted on social media, “where a win is so important to the success of our Party and, most importantly, our Country.”

CNN’s Jeff Zeleny, David Wright and Betsy Klein contributed to this report.

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