Donald Trump has run the most amateurish major-party presidential campaign in recent memory. That was no secret. But any doubt of how amateurish this campaign is was erased when he decided to pull out of Virginia. In the process, his already long odds of overtaking Hillary Clinton got several miles longer.
Late Wednesday, the Trump campaign announced in a conference call that it was effectively ceding Virginia to Hillary, a move two Republican staffers in Virginia confirmed to NBC News. They were among several Republican operatives in Virginia who were caught flatfooted.
Trump’s former Virginia state co-chairman, Corey Stewart, was also dumbfounded by the move. Stewart, who was fired for organizing a protest at RNC headquarters without clearing it with the Trump campaign, said it was “totally premature” to give up on Virginia. He believed that if Trump had been willing to “spend money on an ad campaign,” Hillary would have had a fight on her hands.
At first glance, Trump’s decision made sense, since he faced daunting odds of taking Virginia. As I write this on Thursday night, FiveThirtyEight gives Hillary a 90.7 percent chance of winning Virginia, and assumes she will defeat Trump by just over eight points. By comparison, Barack Obama won Virginia by six points in 2008 and four points in 2012.
However, Stewart noted that Trump hadn’t had much of a campaign in Virginia in the first place. He claimed that Trump hadn’t spent any money on ads “in months”–no small consideration, since much of Virginia is part of the expensive Washington market. Stewart added that Trump only had “a fraction of the number of paid staff” as Hillary had in Virginia.
A source close to the decision told NBC News that Trump has decided to run “essentially a four-state campaign,” focusing all of his efforts on taking Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. The problem is obvious. Without Virginia, if Trump loses even one of those states, there is no politically realistic path for him to get to 270. In other words, he literally has no margin for error.
Given that Trump was in deep trouble even before the Access Hollywood tape came out, he needed everything to break right for him. But by shrinking his map to just four states, his odds just got as thin as his hairline.
(featured image: screengrab from YouTube)
