Let’s not whitewash it. Donald Trump has had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad October. And it may be about to get a lot worse. A Republican official in Arizona fears that the Donald is on the verge of handing Arizona to Hillary Clinton on a platter.
Matthew Benson, a veteran GOP operative who served as a senior aide to Governor Jan Brewer, thinks that “barring something unforeseen,” Hillary will be only the second Democrat to carry Arizona since 1952. As far as Benson is concerned, Trump will only have himself to blame. Most polling this summer has shown the race in Arizona to be much tighter than it’s been in memory for a presidential election. And yet, Benson hasn’t seen “the type of activity you’d expect to see” from the Trump campaign.
Trump has virtually no presence worth mentioning in Arizona. He hasn’t aired any TV or radio ads in the state. One of the few ads that could have aired there probably can’t air there legally; an ad that included footage of Trump arriving for his big immigration speech in Phoenix was red-flagged by Phoenix officials for illegally using footage of on-duty Phoenix cops.
Strangely, Trump has spent a lot of time in Arizona–too much for some Arizona Republicans’ comfort, in fact. But apparently for all the time he’s spent there, he’s invested very little on a ground operation. He has committed only $15,000 for direct mail in October–and only $7,000 for the last week of the campaign. A number of other Arizona Republicans told NBC News that they have yet to see any pro-Donald messaging. He has relied almost entirely on the state party to get his message out.
The closest parallel I can think of is to Indiana in 2008. John McCain had almost no presence there, even after polls showed the race within single digits. Apparently he believed that Indiana would simply revert to its normal state as an automatic 11-vote deposit in the GOP bank account. It came back to haunt him when Barack Obama was able to run it up enough in Indianapolis, South Bend, and the Chicago suburbs to narrowly carry the state.
However, Trump has even less excuse to ignore Arizona this year. After all, there have been strong indications for some time that as the growing Latino population is making Arizona a lot more purple. And now it looks like he’s paying the price.
According to Benson, Trump’s ground operation pales in comparison to the one Mitt Romney ran in 2012–which is even more remarkable considering that Romney had Arizona locked up tight. As it stands now, Benson fears that the Donald’s anemic presence in Arizona could potentially hurt Republicans down ballot as well. He’s not alone; one other GOP official thinks that Hillary has no worse than a 50-50 shot of winning Arizona–and if that happens, “it will be because Trump lost Arizona rather than because Clinton won it.”
The raw numbers bear this out. As I write this on Monday night, FiveThirtyEight has Arizona as a pale shade of blue; it rates Hillary’s chances of winning the state at 56 percent. Now, consider that Trump has more or less staked his chances on flipping just four states–Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. However, with Trump essentially ceding Virginia to Hillary, he has to win all four of them to have any politically realistic chance of getting to 270. If he loses Arizona and its 11 electoral votes as well, though, in all likelihood he will be finished. After all, if Trump loses both Virginia and Arizona, it can safely be assumed that his four-state strategy has gone bust as well.
Don’t take this as an invitation to get complacent, though. Trump must not only be defeated, but defeated in a landslide. Indeed, FiveThirtyEight’s current map forecasts a 346-192 victory for Hillary–a map that looks a lot like a Democratic landslide. It will take a massive landslide to put the GOP on notice–they cannot foist a manifestly unfit candidate on this nation and get away with it.
(featured image courtesy Michael Vadon, available under a Creative Commons BY-SA license)
