Is Trump going to repeat Hillary's big mistake?

His re-election campaign wants to play everywhere. Big mistake.

President Trump.
(Image credit: Illustrated | LUDOVIC MARIN/AFP/Getty Images, Wikimedia Commons, Library of Congress, yopinco/istock, jakkapan21/iStock)

The 2020 presidential election is Donald Trump's to lose. He has all the built-in advantages of any incumbent, but he is still vulnerable to the right Democratic challenger. His obsession with relitigating the pre-history of the special counsel's investigation is understandable and probably justified, but it will do him no favors with the crucial 100,000 or so voters, many of them Democrats, who pushed him to victory two and a half years ago in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. The fact that manufacturing jobs, especially in the auto industry, have continued to disappear in the former two states despite his frequently repeated pledges to prevent this is not helping either.

I wonder whether Trump's campaign recognizes this and is already trying to compensate for possible losses in the Midwest by seeking victories elsewhere. This is the only sense I was able to make of comments made by his campaign manager, Brad Parscale, in a recent interview on Face the Nation. According to Parscale, the president's re-election campaign is interested in trying to flip not only Nevada and New Mexico, both of which last went Republican in 2004, but also New Hampshire and Minnesota, which has not given its electoral votes to a Republican since the Nixon landslide of 1972. There are Americans who cast their first votes in that election who are now 70 years old.

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Matthew Walther

Matthew Walther is a national correspondent at The Week. His work has also appeared in First Things, The Spectator of London, The Catholic Herald, National Review, and other publications. He is currently writing a biography of the Rev. Montague Summers. He is also a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.