With the election now barely 14 months away, Donald Trump’s net approval rating continues to sink in every battleground state — as it has every month since he took office in January 2017, Axios reports.
Citing data compiled by the Morning Consult website, Axios notes particularly dramatic slides for the president in Southwestern states like Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico. He has also done poorly in Midwestern and Rust Belt states he won in 2016, like Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, Pennsylvania and Ohio.
“Net approval rating” is defined as voter approval minus disapproval. The trend for Trump is downward in all 17 states Morning Consult designates as battlegrounds for the 2020 race.
Both Republicans and Democrats believe those 17 are the states where “the election will be decided,” Axios says.
“In addition to the key purple states — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — that both sides recognize as targets, the Trump campaign has its sights set on Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire and New Mexico, all states Trump lost in 2016,” the website says, citing “several campaign officials.”
One of those officials told Axios that Trump’s campaign is “aggressively” trying to “expand the map” — in those four states especially — adding that the Trump team “will soon be flooding these states with stories that don’t get a lot of attention at the national level — such as Trump’s work on opioids and the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade deal.”
Democrats are said to be focusing on flipping Arizona, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Texas — all states Trump won handily in 2016 — into their victory column.
Axios points out, however, that Trump’s overall approval ratings, though smaller, are still positive in Texas and Georgia.
“We dream that the Democrats think they can get Texas. It’s a total fantasy,” one Trump campaign official said.
Campaign aides on both sides “privately acknowledge that they expect the election to be razor-thin in many of these states, just as it was in 2016,” Axios says.
It adds that the Trump campaign believes support from the Republican National Committee and the outsized Democratic field will “give them the upper hand,” even though Trump’s approval rating is “underwater” in all but two of the battlegrounds.
