With less than a month until the election, every hour of every day matters for a presidential candidate. Presidential campaigns are forced to make excruciating decisions about which battleground states to put most of their time, money and energy into as they seek decisive edges over their opponents.
That’s what makes former President Donald Trump’s decision to campaign in a number of blue states in these final weeks baffling. Trump is doing events in Colorado, California, Illinois and New York — states that are virtually impossible for him to win. “President Joe Biden won those states by an average of 20 points in 2020, with his 13-point Colorado win the closest,” NBC News reports. “And Colorado is the only one of those states to have voted for a Republican presidential nominee this millennium, backing George W. Bush in 2004.”
It’s possible that Trump is succumbing to his deteriorating instincts.
What is Trump thinking? As always, it’s impossible to know — or whether he even is thinking. The former president has shown signs that suggest declining mental acuity, and his rhetorical patterns are more discursive and difficult to follow. Given his tendency to surround himself with yes-men, it’s possible that Trump is succumbing to his deteriorating instincts, that his campaign strategy is becoming as elliptical as his speech — and that nobody is stepping in to tell him he’s wasting his time. Trump has boasted that he can win New York. All candidates say they’re going to win states it’s clear they won’t. But given Trump’s commitment to touring a bunch of blue states, one wonders whether he is high on his own supply.
Trump’s campaign insists there’s a method to the madness. “Choosing high-impact settings makes it so the media can’t look away and refuse to cover the issues and the solutions President Trump is offering,” a senior Trump campaign adviser told NBC News of the campaign’s blue state strategy. “We live in a nationalized media environment, and the national media’s attention on these large-scale, outside-the-norm settings increases the reach of his message across the country and penetrates in every battleground state.”
According to that theory, this very article is proof that Trump’s bizarro strategy is working. The tendency of the national press to document, comment on and question the wisdom of the strategy purportedly helps Trump garner free attention and win over voters in states he must win.
That theory is a little too clever by half. The substance of coverage matters, too. And much of it of it will likely, like this article, point out that Trump seems to be behaving foolishly to the point where he could be sabotaging his chances of winning. A number of Republican strategists have criticized Trump’s blue state tour. Republican operative Matthew Bartlett told NBC News, “This does not seem like a campaign putting their candidate in critical vote-rich or swing-vote locations — it seems more like a candidate who wants his campaign to put on rallies for optics and vibes.”One of those vibes that Trump is trying to create is fear. He seeks to frame cities run by Democrats or in states controlled by Democrats as ground zero for the mostly made-up migrant-related crises he claims his presidency would solve. At an event in Aurora, Colorado, on Friday, Trump adviser Stephen Miller pointed at photos of suspected migrant gang members in the area. “Are these the neighbors that you want in your city?” Miller asked, eliciting boos from the crowd. Trump may be hoping that depicting Aurora as a miserable place persuades or motivates voters in swing states to vote for him, lest Vice President Kamala Harris make all of America look like Aurora. (Mind you, Trump’s stories of a “gang takeover” in the town are a combination of extremely exaggerated and false.) But as Trump obsesses over stagecraft and the best place to use migrants as scary props to try to garner votes, he endures what we know to be an opportunity cost. Political scientists have found that battleground state campaigning is an opportunity to persuade local voters and can have a statistically significant effect on voting numbers. So as Trump attempts newfangled ways to obliquely scare or inspire voters using crowds in blue states, he’s missing out on what could be critical opportunities to win over voters in battleground states, many of which could be won by extremely tight margins. We don’t know whether Trump’s divergence from the standard campaigning playbook will help him win any votes. What we do know is that he’s wasting key opportunities to deny Harris the most coveted votes in the race. When people point out that Trump seems to be rambling incoherently, he counters that he’s using a brilliant rhetorical strategy he calls “the weave.” He now wants us to believe that a failure to prioritize the places most important for him to win is brilliant, too.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Politico, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter by clicking the link at the top of this bio. 
