The Hillary Clinton campaign is sending vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine into Republican territory this week, where he will make fundraising stops in Wyoming, Missouri, and Idaho. By this point in a presidential race, most vice presidential contestants would be firmly planted in highly contested swing states until election day. Instead, the Democratic ticket is aiming to make the Donald Trump campaign squirm — and force them to spend more time and money in states that are traditionally Republican strongholds.
The Clinton-Kaine campaign has already been trying to force Trump’s attention to the largely Republican states of Arizona, Georgia, and Utah. Trump currently leads Clinton by less than 1 percent in Arizona and less than 2 percent in Georgia. His lead in Utah is a more comfortable 7 percent. Clinton has leads over Trump in most traditional swing states, including Ohio, Florida, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Iowa, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Virginia. “Part of what they want to signal is that she has so many pathways to 270 [electoral votes], and the more that the campaign moves toward November, the more diverse those pathways get for Hillary and the narrower that path gets for Trump,” Democratic strategist Maria Cardona told Politico.
Kevin Madden, a senior advisor to Mitt Romney in 2012, echoed those sentiments. “[The Clinton campaign has] an ability to go on offense with their media message and to pile onto this idea that the map is shrinking for Donald Trump and expanding for Democrats,” he said. “So when they’re doing routine fundraising in [traditionally red] states, they have the ability to do so because they don’t have to position their vice presidential candidate in battleground states in order to bracket the other ticket. They’re free to open up a new front.”
(Via Politico & Huffington Post Pollster)