Trump’s path (to hell)

Donald Trump’s path to victory

He needs to best Romney with white men and turn a few reliably blue Rust Belt states red.

By Eli Stokols

Donald Trump has vowed to remake the electoral map by winning states that have been reliably blue in recent cycles — but the GOP’s best pollsters say his bluster is a long way from aligning with reality.

Trump, who has been slow to campaign in swing states while raising money by stumping in red states like Texas last week, should be able to count on winning Republican strongholds — states such as Arizona (11 Electoral College votes) and Georgia (16), where he campaigned last Wednesday, despite some optimism from Democrats that those increasingly diverse states could be put in play. In total, the party’s electoral math gurus say the presumptive GOP nominee likely starts the general election with a hold on 19 states, giving him a total of 164 Electoral College votes.

To reach 270, Trump’s team is aiming to capture America’s Rust Belt — specifically, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin — where polls generally show him performing better than Mitt Romney did at this point in 2012. If he can capture Florida and keep North Carolina — the 2012 red state of the lightest hue — a strong showing that includes capture of the Rust Belt could, Trump’s team believes, put him over the top.

But the odds are long, veteran strategists said.

“It’s a fantasy. Romney got 19 percent of nonwhites. Is Trump going to do better? I don’t think so,” said Stuart Stevens, Romney’s 2012 campaign strategist. “It’s a joke. It’s just talking. It has no grounding in reality.”

Trump, however, is looking even farther afield. He is talking up his chances in states like New York and California and making tactical moves aimed at boosting his support in states no Republican presidential hopeful has won since the 1980s.

Despite being the only candidate left standing in the GOP field, Trump campaigned for three weeks in California, contending that he can take the state’s 55 electoral votes away from Hillary Clinton in November. And while his campaign has yet to hire a state director in Ohio, Trump recently brought on John McLaughlin, a New York pollster, to help him win his home state — even though polls show Clinton ahead by more than 20 percentage points, according to the RealClearPolitics average.

On Thursday, Trump reportedly told donors during a meeting that he thinks he can put New Jersey and Maryland in play as well. Plus, a super PAC backing him is tossing money into national cable ads rather than targeting voters in the battlegrounds.

But the consensus of the Republican political and polling world outside Trump Tower is that he cannot expect to make such dramatic inroads; most pollsters say this unpredictable election cycle has not changed the fundamental electoral math, even as it has taught the most seasoned observers to expect the unexpected.

“Never in modern history have we seen two nominees who have an unfavorable rating over 50 percent,” said Ed Goeas, a Republican pollster in Washington. “We’re truly in uncharted waters trying to use history to determine what’s going to happen in this campaign.”

Those close to his campaign privately say Trump’s pronouncements about turning some strongly Democratic states is essentially an old-fashioned head fake — an effort to raise money while forcing Clinton’s team to spend its own defending safe territory.

“He’s just poking and prodding to see if he can put [California] in play,” said one operative who works closely with the campaign. “He doesn’t have to win but would love to make her spend some money and time there.”

But he will need to outperform Romney to win, and there is no underestimating the difficulty of that task.

With the exception of Wisconsin, where Trump suffered one of his worst primary losses, the Rust Belt states his team has identified appear to be competitive, although current polls are somewhat misleading, taken at a moment when Clinton has yet to bring home disaffected Bernie Sanders supporters. Trump, on the other hand, has been attempting to unify Republicans for more than a month.

“Right now, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida look very close because she’s having a hard time getting Sanders supporters on board,” said Tom Jensen, director of Public Policy Polling, whose most recent surveys show Clinton with a lead of 1 percentage point over Trump in Pennsylvania and a 3-point edge in Ohio.

“Republicans are more unified right now than Democrats,” he continued. “Trump’s lead with Republicans [in Pennsylvania] was 12 points bigger than her lead with Democrats, but it remains to be seen if that can be sustained. One thing we saw is that 72 percent of Sanders supporters say they’d vote for Clinton over Trump — and if she gets just half of them, her lead balloons to around 6 or 7 points.”

It’s a similar situation in Florida, where PPP’s most recent survey, taken two weeks ago, showed Trump with a 1-point lead but Clinton having far more room to increase support from her own party.

With Colorado and Virginia trending Democratic in recent cycles and Nevada and other states with high Hispanic populations a long shot for Trump, Pennsylvania is increasingly viewed as Trump’s best pickup chance — the state that, provided he wins Ohio and Florida, could get him to 270. But even with strong support from working-class whites in the western part of the state and conservatives in central Pennsylvania’s “T” region, Trump’s only chance of pulling the upset rests on his ability to broaden his support in the voter-rich “collar” counties outside Philadelphia, where Romney lost in 2012 by 14 points.

Trump won the Pennsylvania primary but saw his vote total in those swing suburban counties come in 25 points lower than his support in the western part of the state that borders Appalachia, where he won close to 8 in 10 votes in some places.

“For him to win here, he really needs to do better in the suburban counties, and he’s underperforming based on our numbers from where he needs to be,” said Jim Lee, a pollster based in Harrisburg. “These voters are more socially moderate, even though they’re largely Republican in registration; and Trump’s positions on immigration are problematic for a lot of these suburban swing voters.”

There are at least a few reasons for Trump to think he can do better than Romney in Pennsylvania, which has the sixth oldest population in the country.

“For the lean-Democratic voter, Romney wasn’t good enough for them to move away from Obama,” said David Flaherty, whose firm, Magellan Strategies, has done polling in Pennsylvania. “But especially with older, Catholic white voters, Trump’s talk about trade policy is hitting home, so there is more of an opportunity — in Pennsylvania and Ohio. The other thing working in his favor is that younger voters aren’t as enthused about Hillary as they were for Obama.”

Trump’s issue portfolio might give him an opening in Michigan, a state Romney lost despite being the son of a former governor. But a Detroit News poll earlier this month showed Clinton already 5 points ahead.

“Fair trade versus free trade is a very hot issue in Michigan with all the manufacturing,” said Saul Anuzis, a former Michigan GOP chairman who said a Trump win there is a heavy lift but not impossible. “I think his ‘America First’ approach, his trade policies, his building a wall play well in a labor state that’s concerned about jobs.

“Trump will probably do better amongst Reagan Democrats, African-Americans and blue-collar workers than Romney did,” he continued. “But Romney probably did better with independents than Trump will.”

But the other Great Lakes state Trump’s team is eyeing, Wisconsin, is a poor bet, Republicans pollsters say. Trump was defeated badly in the April primary there and the most recent survey shows Clinton with a seven-point lead.

“The southeast part of the state around Milwaukee and all those suburban counties are typically where we see massive Republican turnout in normal elections, and these voters went enormously against Trump in the primary and had enormously negative views, reinforced by talk radio,” said Marquette University’s Charles Franklin, widely recognized as the best pollster in the state. “And those folks remain quite critical of him. That’s why the party here has really had a hard time rallying around him.”

A stronger showing than Romney’s with white voters may not be enough to guarantee a Trump win in Florida, where Hispanics account for 15 percent or more of likely Election Day turnout and are likely to be highly motivated to vote against Trump based largely on his strong anti-illegal immigration stance.

“You can turn out every ‘Bubba’ in North Florida for a month, you’re not going to get there,” said Florida GOP operative Rick Wilson, who has been vehemently anti-Trump and sounding alarms about an electoral blowout from the get-go. “Add up the 23 counties in the Panhandle, and it’s [equal to] Broward and Dade [counties]. Seventy-two percent of Hispanics here disapprove of Trump. There’s no magical thinking that gets you home if you’ve got a guy who calls Hispanics rapists or says a Hispanic judge is unqualified to sit on a case you’re involved in. The racism is the centerpiece of his campaign, and it’s just not a winning electoral strategy in this environment.”

Trump is wrapping up a nine-day cross-country tour over the weekend that included his first visits to general-election swing states since wrapping up the nomination more than five weeks ago. But because the schedule was largely determined based on fundraising opportunities, Trump spent an abundance of time in red states like Texas, Georgia and Arizona.

Trump’s operation, which brought on its first pollster just last month, recognizes that the presumptive nominee needs a successful Republican National Convention next month to better position himself for a general election fight that currently looks like a steep uphill climb.

“We will be very interested to see where this race stands after the conventions,” said one Trump campaign source familiar with the team’s research and general election battle plan. “There is a genuine thirst for an outsider and a total change of direction. Question will be, can we capitalize on it while allaying any concerns without losing our edge.”