Will Donald Trump’s Swing State Spending Gamble Pay Off?

Donald Trump’s team is seemingly “gambling” the upcoming election on winning Pennsylvania and Georgia, according to their advertising spending and several political scientists.
Political candidates are in their last stretch of campaigning until Election Day on November 4, with both main parties having already spent hundreds of millions of dollars on their presidential campaigns.
Both candidates have focused heavily on swing states, with Trump spending drastically more on ads in Pennsylvania ($132.1 million) than nationally ($31.2 million), from March 5 onward, according to campaign monitoring firm AdImpact Politics.
Although Kamala Harris has spent more nationally (£165.2 million) than on the crucial swing state, her spending on Pennsylvania is not far behind, at $150.1 million.
Trump is still set to spend $70.6 million on ad reservations in Pennsylvania, and $28.7 million in Georgia, in the nine weeks between Labor Day and Election Day, AdImpact Politics said in an update on August 30.
This is significantly more than the money set aside for advertising in other battleground states: $6.6 million in Michigan, $9.9 million in Arizona, $3.5 million in Wisconsin, $2.8 million in North Carolina and $1.4 million in Nevada.
Some experts have said this appears to be an intentional strategy on behalf of Trump, including Political Science Professor Christopher A. Cooper, who said it would “make sense.”
The Director of the Haire Institute for Public policy Institute at Western Carolina University told Newsweek: “This strategy makes sense. The most straightforward path to victory for Trump is for him to win every state he won in the last election and flip Pennsylvania and Georgia.
“Flipping those two states, along with the changes due to reapportionment would yield a Trump victory by the narrowest of margins—two electoral college votes. But to pull off this narrow victory, he has to hold on to North Carolina—an outcome that is increasingly in question.”
While Trump is still ahead in many North Carolina polls, after President Joe Biden lost the state in 2020, Kamala Harris has narrowed the gap in many of them. Poll aggregator 538 puts Trump at 46.4 percent and Harris at 45.8 percent.
Cooper added: “I expect to see (Trump’s) campaign expenditures, his travel schedule, and his attention focus with laserlike precision on these three key battlegrounds (Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina)—the three keys he’ll need to hold to win the White House.”
Similarly, Political Science Professor Stephen Farnsworth said Trump is “wise to concentrate” on these three states.
He told Newsweek: “Polls show these three are among the closest states, and they are also places where Democratic candidates often struggle. Surveys suggest that some of the other swing states, such as Wisconsin, may be drifting away from Trump, and so the former president’s best path to 270 Electoral Votes as of now seems to be based in the East.”
“Trump has been forced to play defense given the changing electoral map that followed the new Democratic ticket. Some of the states that Trump had intended to focus on, states such as Virginia, where he has not been popular in the past, might have been within reach if the Democrats had stuck with President Biden.
“The Trump team’s hopes of a big Electoral College win back in June have now given way to the realistic assessment that in this election, such as in the last two presidential elections, the Electoral College can be won or lost on the basis of tens of thousands of votes in a few battleground states.”
Political Science and International Affairs Assistant Professor Jared McDonald called it an “interesting and “conscious strategy” but he also called it a “gamble.”
He told Newsweek: “First, there’s a lot of uncertainty about which state will be the tipping point. Polling errors can be off in some states more than others, leading political professionals to invest in the wrong states. So, underinvesting in these swing states could be an error, especially if that lack of spending hinders get-out-the-vote efforts.
“Second, there are diminishing returns for campaign spending. The first dollar is going to have a greater impact than the 50-millionth dollar, so simply not contesting a state seems misguided.”
However, McDonald also went on to warn that “campaigns are constantly evolving to adapt to new information” so one should not assume that “lower levels of spending in states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, North Carolina and Nevada will necessarily stay that way through November.”
When Newsweek contacted Trump’s team for comment, a spokesperson pointed out that Trump’s campaign schedule targets multiple states, including North Carolina and Wisconsin this week.