Trump's shrinking....

Trump's shrinking swing state map

Several battleground states appear unwinnable for the GOP presidential nominee.

By Kyle Cheney and Katie Glueck

Two months from Election Day, Donald Trump’s swing state map is shrinking.

Interviews with more than two dozen Republican operatives, state party officials and elected leaders suggest three of the 11 battleground states identified by POLITICO — Colorado, New Hampshire and Virginia — are tilting so heavily toward Hillary Clinton that they're close to unwinnable for the GOP presidential nominee. But Trump remains within striking distance in the remaining eight states, including electoral giants Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

The increasing likelihood that Colorado, New Hampshire and Virginia are out of reach heightens the urgency for the Republican nominee to win those still-competitive states — and to recapture steam in Pennsylvania, where he once looked formidable but now trails by 10 points, according to POLITICO’s Battleground States polling average.

Trump’s prospects look dimmest in New Hampshire, the site of his first primary election triumph in February. Republicans remain convinced it’s fundamentally a swing state but at the presidential level, where Trump hasn’t been above 40 percent in public polls since June, many concede the cause is nearly lost.

“I think the probability of Hillary Clinton carrying New Hampshire is well over 90 percent,” said Fergus Cullen, a moderate former chair of the state GOP.

“I don’t think he’s going to win it,” said Bill O’Brien, the conservative former state House speaker who backed Ted Cruz in the primary. “It’s probably going to be a little tighter than the polls show now, but I don’t sense any groundswell of support.”

Trump’s challenges in New Hampshire stem from his organization’s anemic ground game, high unfavorable ratings and the fact that he is struggling to unite state Republicans and independents behind his campaign.

“The Trump team has an opportunity, but the window is closing for him, and they really need to figure it out over the next few weeks,” said a New Hampshire GOP consultant who is a veteran of several presidential campaigns. “I think they’re still trying out figure out how to run their ground game, they’re still testing out messages that work. Hillary Clinton’s numbers here are lousy like they are everywhere else, there are a lot of issues to exploit against her, and they’re not doing it.”

Dave Carney, a longtime New Hampshire GOP strategist who still sees a sliver of opportunity for Trump there, said the Republican nominee is more likely to get swamped by Clinton’s ground game, which will work to her advantage on Election Day, since New Hampshire has same-day voter registration.

The Trump campaign so far hasn’t prioritized New Hampshire: It didn’t invest in an ad buy until last week, when it dropped about $516,000 on a TV campaign, and he has spent much more time in bigger swing states. Clinton, meanwhile, has been on the New Hampshire airwaves for months, spending more than $1 million just on one station, WMUR-TV, and more recently, top surrogates like Bernie Sanders of neighboring Vermont have campaigned in the state on her behalf.

A New Hampshire operative close to the Trump campaign insisted Trump has a path to closing the gap with Clinton now that he is up on the airwaves and that the campaign is kicking into higher gear on air and on the ground as summer ends, just as New Hampshire voters start to pay more attention.

“Obviously, TV makes a difference, complete campaigns make a difference,” the source said. “Not having TV while the other side was advertising significantly in the state makes a huge difference.”

Republican pessimism on New Hampshire seems to dovetail with the thinking in Trump Tower. POLITICO reported Sunday that Trump’s top pollster Tony Fabrizio has presented the candidate with four tiers of swing states that placed New Hampshire at the bottom, along with Michigan and Virginia — suggesting the campaign look to them for cost-effective opportunities in the fall, and only then if the campaign still believed it could win them.

With just four electoral votes, New Hampshire is the smallest swing-state prize. The prospective loss of Virginia, with its 13 electoral votes, is a bigger problem.

“Anything you’re going to spend on Trump is a waste at this point,” said David Ramadan, a former Virginia House member and GOP activist. “The overall vote is going to be determined by Northern Virginia and the Tidewater area. Those two areas are not going to go on the Trump side.”

Populous Northern Virginia’s growth is driven by immigrants and college-educated voters — demographics with which Trump has generally struggled.

His weakness in the region is on display in the state’s most competitive House race, a suburban and exurban seat that covers Northern Virginia’s critical Loudoun, Fairfax and Prince William counties -- all places Trump lost in Virginia’s primary. Incumbent GOP Rep. Barbara Comstock has shown no interest in campaigning with her party’s nominee against a backdrop where Clinton has held consistent polling leads in the state, and her running mate, Tim Kaine, is a former Virginia governor. The state’s current governor, Terry McAuliffe, is one of her most loyal political allies. Her state director in Virginia previously ran McAuliffe’s political arm.

“Organizationally, Clinton has put a lot of resources into Virginia, she’s got her vice presidential candidate there, Terry McAuliffe is completely committed to her, her TV ads have been on for [months], Trump has done none of that,” said Tom Davis, a former congressman who represented Northern Virginia and was honorary chair of Trump foe John Kasich’s efforts in the state. “If and when he does that, he has the opportunity to even up the score.”

“In a year like this, never say never about anything, but I would say it looks like [Virginia] has tilted pretty strongly toward the Democratic camp,” said Tucker Martin, a longtime Republican Virginia operative.

The Trump campaign is still treating Virginia as a battleground: Trump spent Tuesday morning in Virginia Beach and has visited frequently. And the campaign has invested nearly $2 million in a state ad campaign, concentrated in the Washington, D.C. media market that includes the Northern Virginia suburbs. John Whitbeck, the state GOP chairman, said he's advised the Trump campaign to "go all in" on his state, which he views as winnable despite tough polling.

Though other Republicans largely acknowledge Trump is trailing in the state, some still see a window for him. After a spate of August polls reported a double-digit lead for Clinton, two recent polls suggested the contest was within the margin of error.

“I get more and more people who were reticent about Trump, say a month or two months ago, telling me that they’re now going to vote for Trump,” said Bob Marshall, a conservative Virginia House member. “There’s a factor called intensity, which polls are notoriously inept at measuring. Based on my conversations … the intensity for Trump is significantly higher than the intensity for Clinton.”

One longtime Republican strategist in Virginia said Trump’s path is uphill but clear: he has to limit his losses in Northern Virginia, which has seen an explosion in Democratic votes from government employees and suburban women, while driving turnout in the more conservative parts of the state.

“I think you win or lose this race in Loudoun County and Prince William County. Trump’s got to hold his losses down in Fairfax and he needs to win Prince William and Loudoun County,” said the strategist. “If you’re getting your clock cleaned in Northern Virginia and Northern Virginia is 35, 40 percent of the statewide vote -- you can’t lose Northern Virginia 70-30.”

Colorado, where Clinton and her super PAC Priorities USA have suspended most of their ad buys in a sign of their confidence, is a similar story to Virginia. There, vulnerable GOP Congressman Mike Coffman has gone so far as to explicitly criticize Trump’s message in his heavily Hispanic district. Trump himself hasn’t visited the state since July, and he’s spent only $950,000 on the air in the key Mountain West swing state.

“I don’t see a path to victory for Trump in Colorado,” said Tyler Sandberg, who ran Coffman's 2014 reelection campaign.

Just as in Virginia, Republicans holding out hope for a Trump comeback pin it on pockets of Trump support that haven’t materialized in recent polls that give Clinton a double-digit advantage.

“You’re seeing it as a solid blue [at the moment],” said Laura Carno, a Republican strategist in Colorado. “In any ordinary year, you could draw conclusions from that. But I don’t think this is an ordinary year. I can say, as of this moment, those numbers look encouraging for Hillary Clinton. But gosh, what could happen tomorrow and the next day?”

“I just don’t yet trust that this is going to behave like a regular cycle,” she added.

But another Colorado veteran strategist failed to see any reason for hope. “I don’t see Colorado as a swing state, presidentially,” he said. The strategist noted that much of the state’s Republican talent is working to reelect Coffman, who has built his own ground operation, and many others have tethered themselves to high-stakes ballot initiatives rather than work on the presidential campaign.

“It’s too diverse, Colorado and Virginia both are very similar in that way,” he said. “Republican women have fled Trump and they’re not coming back. They might go with Gary Johnson.”

State party chairmen in Virginia and Colorado both warned against reading too much into polls that show Trump trailing their states. Each has its own strong GOP field program, they noted, supplemented by several dozen field staffers supplied by the Republican National Committee.

Virginia's Whitbeck noted that 2013 gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli and 2014 Senate candidate Ed Gillespie both trailed by double digits in late-campaign polls and wound up losing nail-biters.

Colorado Republican Party Chairman Steve House said he considers his state a "margin of error" race, regardless of recent polls that suggest the contest there isn't even close.

"People are nervous about Trump because you never know when you're going to run into a day where Mr. Trump is going to say something you wish he didn’t say," he said. "But I think there’s a lot of people here focused on the jobs report in August … it's about the economy. It’s always been about the economy."

Trump still has a viable path to 270 electoral votes if Colorado, New Hampshire and Virginia fall off the map. The eight remaining battleground states where polling and interviews with state and local party officials suggest the race remains competitive together represent 120 electoral votes.

Florida, Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina and Ohio are all neck-and-neck, according to polling averages. Clinton has a clearer polling edge in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

In fact, Wisconsin could find itself off the map as well soon, according to Republicans there. As is the case nationally, Trump has seen an uptick in support in recent Wisconsin polls, but many Republicans fear his positioning there is tenuous — and they noticed it wasn't among the states included in Trump's recent ad-spending binge.

“He’s fallen flat in a lot of ways in Wisconsin, he’s got to fix that,” said Republican strategist Mark Graul. “The primary did not work out for him, he’s got a lot of problems with conservative voters in the state, particularly in the southeast part of the state.”

Wisconsin hasn’t voted Republican in a presidential contest since 1984, but the Democratic margin was razor-thin as recently as 2004 and at the state level the GOP has been ascendant. So far, Clinton is not spending much money there, but Trump doesn’t appear to be investing significant resources either, giving Republicans on the ground the impression that it’s not among the more competitive states — and there’s no clear path for it to turn that way, they say, barring a major downturn in Clinton’s fortunes.

“I wouldn’t today call it competitive,” said Brandon Scholz, another longtime Republican operative in the state. “It has potential only because of things you can’t put your thumb on.”

Added Charlie Sykes, an influential conservative radio host who remains staunchly opposed to Trump, “I still think it would be a huge upset to win Wisconsin, mainly because he’s underperformed in southeastern Wisconsin. It’s the heart and soul of the Republican base.”

One national Republican strategist said the Trump campaign must be making internal decisions already about whether to redeploy resources — especially as Clinton attempts to expand the electoral map to include Arizona and Georgia. But the expectation is that the final call on which states to cut loose or prioritize won’t be made until the third or fourth week of September.

“If the numbers are baked in New Hampshire, cut your losses and redeploy,” the strategist said. “Go into a state where you’ve got a 48 percent chance of winning as opposed to a 32 percent chance. That’s a triage, but those kind of last-stand decisions don’t get made the first week in September.”