-- As his 2020 campaign gears up, President Donald Trump is putting an early focus on the three Rust Belt states that sent him to the White House after Republican losses in midterm elections showed his support in the region is fading.
The Trump campaign has been going out of its way to defend the territory. Senior campaign officials traveled to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, early in the week to assure state party officials the president has a strategy and the organization to again win.
“He still has his Trump base in Wisconsin and all around the county, and these are the people who come for the rallies,” said David Canon, a professor of American politics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “But it’s a relatively small percentage of the overall electorate right now in Wisconsin.”
Trump doesn’t need to win all three of the Rust Belt states to win a second term -- provided he holds all other states he won in 2016. But he needs at least one, and he won them by a scant combined 77,000 votes in 2016 out of nearly 14 million cast in the three states.
Trump has raised a record amount for a president in his first two years and is picking up the pace. Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee jointly reported raising $71 million in the first quarter of the year and have $82 million in the bank. The 16 leading candidates in the Democratic field together reported raising about $77 million, before Biden’s entry.
Trump aides say that for now, they regard the Democrats as one big field in which Sanders and liberal freshman members of Congress will tug all of the candidates to the left. That will mean embracing positions on the environment, health care and immigration that the president’s allies consider out of the mainstream in battleground states such as the Rust Belt.