Daily Scoop 🍨: Trump Media Technology (DJT) Bullish As Trump Leads Presidential Candidacy 🚀❤️

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.

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.