CNN
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Donald Trump’s schedule in the final weeks of the 2024 election includes detours to majority Democrats.
From California’s Coachella Valley to New York’s Madison Square Garden on Saturday, the campaigns of both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are coming off a months-long slog from the swing that is expected to decide the race.
Republicans have no illusions about winning the deep blue states he visits — Trump, who refused to accept his loss in 2020 and spread lies about widespread voter fraud, said this week that he had more support than Harris in California. Four years ago he lost 29 percentage points.
“If they had an honest election in California, I think I would win it by a landslide. I really do,” the former president complained about the state’s mail-in voting practices on the Southern California talk radio show “The John Kobilt Show.”
But Trump’s allies argue the blue-state stops are more than unregulated sideshows designed to satisfy the Republican nominee’s preferences.
Although Democrats dominate California and New York, the states’ overall size means they are home to large numbers of Republican voters and donors, creating fundraising opportunities and helping low-turnout candidates, especially in competitive House races.
“We have a lot of support in California, and I feel like I owe it to them,” Trump told Cobilt, adding that the Coachella Valley rally site is “a big piece of land.”
The events also give Trump opportunities to articulate the problems he faces in the states he’s in as a result of Democratic leadership.
That’s the playbook Trump used in Detroit on Thursday, when he warned that if Harris wins, “our whole country will look like Detroit.”
But unlike in Michigan’s biggest city, Trump can make similar comments in blue states without worrying about electoral backlash — especially in California, where Harris was attorney general and a U.S. senator.
“President Trump’s Coachella trip will highlight Harris’ record of failure and show that he has the right solutions to save every state and every American,” Steven Cheung, Trump’s communications director, said in a statement.
Trump’s campaign hopes to draw large, raucous crowds, and garner media attention — which will pay off on the political map.
“His rallies have little place in this nationalized media environment. Whatever he does, his message gets to all the major media markets. And the bigger the rally, the more attention it gets, right? I mean, Madison Square Garden? You have to cover it,” a senior Trump adviser told CNN. Place said.
Trump advisers argue that the voters his campaign is targeting in the final weeks of the race are generally apolitical — so there’s plenty of content, such as his trips to Aurora, Colorado on Friday, to hammer Harris on immigration. Reach more online than a typical swing-state campaign rally.
It’s the same reason Trump’s campaign sat down the former president with popular YouTube streamers and podcasters. Harris’ campaign has used a similar strategy in recent weeks, targeting specific groups of voters through his appearances on podcasts and other interviews.
“There’s a reason we do podcasts. There’s a reason we do Austin Ross and MMA. There’s a reason we do those things,” said a senior Trump adviser.
Trump’s rally Saturday at Calhoun Ranch in the Coachella Valley drew criticism from several local officials.
“Trump’s attacks on immigrants, women, the LGBTQ community and the most vulnerable among us are inconsistent with the values of our community,” Coachella Mayor Steven Hernandez said in a statement on social media ahead of Trump’s visit.
“He has consistently expressed disdain for the diversity that helps define Coachella,” Hernandez said. “We don’t know why Trump is going to Coachella, but we do know that he wasn’t invited by the people who live here. He is not like us.
However, the former president hopes to hold large rallies in blue states on Saturday, showing how deep his support runs across the country.
They also laid the groundwork for Trump to question the election results if Harris wins. One of the former president’s catchphrases is “too big to rig” — the idea of winning so big that no one questions his success.
“He thinks that crowd is going to show up and there’s no way he’s going to win,” said one person close to Trump.
In many ways, Trump sees these large-scale rallies as a barometer of how he’s doing. In his mind, he expects to do better in November if the crowd is bigger.
On Tuesday, Trump will make a stop in Illinois, another blue state, to attend an event co-sponsored by Bloomberg News and the Economic Club of Chicago.
Trump also plans to return to New York — where he has held rallies in the Bronx and Long Island in recent weeks, as part of an effort to appeal to nonwhites who have historically supported Democrats.
The September stop on Long Island was initially planned to coincide with Trump’s sentencing in Manhattan at his New York hush money trial, but the judge overseeing the case eventually pushed the date to after the election.
Meanwhile, at Madison Square Garden on Oct. 27, a little more than a week from Election Day, Trump will give a legendary theater performance in his hometown.
Trump has long teased the Madison Square Garden rally. But sources close to the former president were reluctant to announce the rally, even after a deal was struck, where there could be outside pressure to pull out, particularly from powerful New Yorkers.
Although Trump lost the Empire State by more than 20 points in both 2016 and 2020, he insisted at his Long Island rally in September that he had a chance to win the state in November.
“Trump is increasingly fixated on the idea that his supporters in states not considered critical to the 2024 election deserve a chance to see him and attend a rally,” said a person close to Trump. “In some cases, those events can be an even bigger draw because it’s the only opportunity to get a lot of people to a rally.”
Trump expresses confidence in how he will fare in the blue states he visits. He said Friday in Aurora that he was “very close” to a reliably Democratic state — though he had no evidence to back that up.
However, the main strategic objective of those trips is to attack Democrats on issues that Trump’s campaign considers its strongest point, including crime and border security.
Trump, who has been promoting false and sensationalist claims about Venezuelan gang members taking over Colorado, attacked the state’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, on Friday.
“This guy doesn’t see what you see. He doesn’t see people blasting into buildings with AK-47s, military-style weapons, sometimes better than our military,” he said.
If he wins in November, Trump said he would create a federal program to speed up the deportation of undocumented gang members. He also called for the death penalty for “any immigrant who kills an American citizen or law enforcement officer.”
Colorado Sen. Michael Bennett, a Democrat, told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Trump is lying about immigrant crime in Colorado — but from a political perspective, he was somewhat “glad” to see the former president in the state.
“He’s not going to win Colorado State,” Bennett said. “So, from a political perspective, I think it’s a waste of his time.”
