The real reason Donald Trump is doubling down on Nevada of all places

| 9:09 am EDT September 13, 2020
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Donald Trump and his campaign have suddenly decided that their path to victory in the 2020 election somehow runs through Nevada of all places. Trump is campaigning there this weekend. Trump’s lapdog Roger Stone is openly fantasizing about Trump sending his goons to harass voters in Nevada. Why so much sudden focus on this state?

The polling averages suggest that Joe Biden is ahead by a small but steady margin in Nevada. It doesn’t appear to be in play, and there’s no reason that Trump can do anything to put it into play. But the reality is this: Trump is further behind in some of the 2016 states he won, such as Pennsylvania, than he is in Nevada. So it appears he’s already shifting to Plan B, where he sacrifices some of the time he could have spent in states like Pennsylvania and Michigan, under the premise that he’ll probably lose them anyway, and he instead spends some of that time in places like Nevada.

To be clear, there’s no reason to expect this to work. There probably isn’t even any expectation within Trump’s camp that it’s going to work. But if his campaign handlers are now expecting him to lose some of the states that he won in 2016, then he’ll have to make it up somewhere. And while Nevada is a long shot for him, he’s in a deep enough hole that he has no good moves left, so he’s instead reduced to going for the long shots.