Why Trump is headed into ‘the belly of the beast’: The strategy behind his blue state stops

With three-and-a-half weeks until Election Day, former President Trump is holding a rally in Southern California on Saturday.

His campaign also announced this week that the Republican presidential nominee will hold a rally in New York City’s Madison Square Garden later this month. 

On Friday, Trump stopped in Colorado, and on Tuesday he’s scheduled to parachute into Illinois.

It’s been 40 years since a Republican carried New York in a presidential election, 36 years since California and Illinois went red in a White House race, and two decades since the GOP captured Colorado.

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Former President Trump speaks at a rally in Uniondale, New York, on Sept. 18. (Julia Bonavita/Fox News Digital)

With time an extremely precious commodity for the presidential campaigns in the final stretch of a White House showdown in a margin-of-error race with Vice President Kamala Harris, many are wondering why Trump is stopping in blue states, which his chances of carrying are extremely slim to nonexistent.

“We just rented Madison Square Garden. We’re going to make a play. We’re going to make a play for New York. Hasn’t been done in a long time. It hasn’t been done in many decades,” Trump said at a rally in Pennsylvania this week, hours after his campaign announced the New York City date.

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“We’re making a play for New Jersey. We’re making a play for Virginia,” Trump continued, before adding that he’s also aiming to compete in Minnesota and New Mexico.

Despite the former president’s bravado about expanding the electoral map, the latest Fox News Power Rankings in the 2024 presidential election rank New York, New Jersey, California and Colorado as solid Democrat, with Minnesota, New Mexico and Virginia as likely blue.

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Trump on Saturday will headline a rally in Coachella, a city in California’s Riverside County southeast of Palm Springs that’s best known nationally for a music festival that takes place nearby every April. 

“President Trump’s visit to Coachella will highlight Harris’ poor record and show that he has the right solutions for every state and every American,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement.

The stop in Coachella may also benefit Trump with Latino voters — who have been trending towards the GOP in recent years — not only in southeast California, but more importantly in neighboring Arizona and Nevada, two of the seven crucial battleground states that will likely determine if the former president or Harris wins the 2024 election.

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Trump’s rally in Madison Square Garden on Oct. 27 will be his third major campaign event in Democrat-dominated New York this year.

Last month, he packed the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, just outside of New York City. And he attracted thousands at a rally in NYC’s borough of The Bronx in May.

He also held a large rally in May along the shore in New Jersey.

Former President Trump gestures at a campaign rally in Wildwood, New Jersey, on May 11. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

“Choosing high-impact settings makes it so the media can’t look away and refuse to cover the issues and the solutions President Trump is offering,” a senior Trump campaign adviser told Fox News when asked about the strategy of holding October events in blue states. “We live in a nationalized media environment and the national media’s attention on these large-scale, outside-the-norm settings increases the reach of his message across the country and penetrates in every battleground state.”

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Longtime Republican strategist Jesse Hunt, a veteran of multiple GOP presidential campaigns, noted that these stops in blue states are less about geography and more about the message.

“Trump is creating a lot of unique and interesting contrast situations that can then be beamed into a mass audience in states that they care about,” Hunt said. “You have to create compelling narratives, compelling contrasts. I think that’s part of what Trump is doing.”

Hunt argued that Trump is a pro “at creating these moments that penetrate our fractured media environment” and that “voters in Georgia, voters in North Carolina, are certainly going to consume news about Trump’s event in Madison Square Garden.”

Former President Trump speaks during a campaign rally in the South Bronx in New York City on May 23. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)

Pointing to veteran campaign strategists Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, who are steering Trump’s 2024 campaign, Hunt said they’re “a pretty smart team… and they’re not going to waste his time.”

Seasoned Republican strategist Matthew Bartlett agreed that “we are at a point where everything is nationalized.”

He argued that the Trump blue state events “will spin an entire news cycle. It will give his supporters talking points. And I think there’s admiration of going into the belly of the beast, to going into your opponent’s territory.”

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Bartlett added that “of course, there’s a downside.”

“In the waning days, if this strategy proves ineffective, it could be similar to what Hillary Clinton did, which was mismanaged her time in the last few days of 2016, by not being in the critical swing states, not being in places where you have to drive turnout,” he warned.

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