During his not-entirely-well-received visit to Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Donald Trump's political director, Jim Murphy, let a group of representatives in on a little secret. According to the Wall Street Journal, Murphy said that the campaign would focus on the states on the map below.
(Created with our nifty electoral college mapmaker; go play with it.)
Seventeen states is a lot. If your math isn't super great or you can't be bothered to do the calculation, that's about a third of the country. Combined, the states are worth 208 electoral votes. Win all of these, and Trump wins the election handily.
The problem for Trump is that winning these states is not that easy. These are the states on that list that Mitt Romney won in 2012.
On average, the 17 states Trump identified have been won by the Republican in five of the last nine elections, which seems promising, though that takes us back to 1980 and includes the massive blowout of 1984, so it's really about a split.
The states have been trending away from the Republicans, though. Ronald Reagan won at least 15 of them both times he ran. George H. W. Bush won 14. Each time he won, George W. Bush won 11. In 2008, John McCain won only three -- one of which was his home state.
A look at how the states have trended since 1980 is interesting. States that President Obama won in 2012 by wider margins have mostly been voting Democratic longer. One exception is Pennsylvania, which was closer than most states that have been consistently Democratic. (We wrote about why last month.) The five states that backed Romney, though, aren't as consistent, thanks in part to Indiana which went for Obama in 2008 and Romney by a wide margin four years later.
The graph below shows the margin for one party or the other in each election since 1980 in the 17 states, ordered from biggest Obama margin in 2012 to biggest margin for Romney. If the margin was greater than 20 points in any election, the line goes off the chart.
You can see that cluster where Obama's margin was the smallest: Pennsylvania, Colorado, Virginia, Ohio and Florida. Flip all five of those and Trump wins by 52 electoral votes. This isn't too shocking. If you weren't aware that Ohio and Florida were key presidential election states, we suspect that you're just a hair shy of being able to get your learner's permit.
The problem for Trump at this point is that he's already trailing in many of those states. Hillary Clinton is outperforming Obama's 2012 numbers at this stage of the race everywhere but Ohio, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania among the states where we have data from the RealClearPolitics polling average. While she's trailing Obama's lead in those states, she still leads in all three.
Part of this is because her campaign is already out there campaigning. At this point, Clinton (and her allied PACs) is outspending Trump (and his) by a 46-to-1 margin in battleground states, according to NBC News' Mark Murray.
Team Clinton is outspending Team Trump in battleground-state ads by a 46-to-1 margin https://t.co/x89jE0qp4E pic.twitter.com/LtfC7r7qSf
— Mark Murray (@mmurraypolitics) July 7, 2016
To understate it a bit: Such an imbalance has not proven to be a winning campaign strategy in the past.
More bizarre still is that the Journal reports Trump's campaign manager as insisting that the team still thought they had a shot in New York and California. A Field Poll conducted in California this month showed Clinton leading Trump by 30 points, a bigger margin than Obama saw in 2012 in any state besides Hawaii or Vermont.
Or we can put it another way. Here's the voting trend for California and New York.
Jim Murphy's 17-state plan is broad, but not impossible, assuming the campaign at some point starts to campaign. Talk of Trump competing in New York or California is the sort of clearly incorrect misrepresentation that could really only find a home where it was offered: Capitol Hill.