Requiem for a grifter
I think I detect a slight flaw in this strategery:
President Donald Trump’s campaign has all but pulled its advertising out of Florida, as it stakes its relatively small bank account on the industrial northern states that carried him to victory in 2016. Since the beginning of the fall campaign on Labor Day, Trump has cut $24 million from his national ad budget, while former Vice President Joe Biden has added $197 million. Biden has outspent Trump
three-to-one over that time. Trump is now placing his final bet on just four battleground states: Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Polls show he’s down in all those states but Ohio, where it’s effectively even.
The president still has $350,275 budgeted to spend on ads in Florida through Election Day, but has canceled $5.5 million in the final two weeks of the campaign, according to data compiled from ad-tracking firm Advertising Analytics. The Trump campaign says its organizational strength in Florida will carry it into Trump’s column on Election Night as Republicans get more in-person voters to the polls.
The most significant thing about this is that it suggests the campaign’s internal polling in Florida looks terrible. (This reminds me of the truly tragic fact that you have to pay for campaign ads up front, so you can’t stiff your partners, which basically destroys Donald Trump’s entire business model right there).
Also too, when I posted about early voting five hours ago the national total was 64.7 million. Now it’s 68.6 million.