“Signs of anxiety inside the Trump team are evident across the electoral map. Over the past few weeks, the president’s operation has spent about $1.7 million on advertising in just three states he carried in 2016 — Ohio, Iowa and Arizona — that it had hoped would not be competitive at all this year. Much of that sum went to a concentrated two-week barrage in Ohio, according to the media-tracking firm Advertising Analytics.
The spending in Ohio startled many Republicans, given that four years ago Mr. Trump defeated Hillary Clinton there by eight percentage points.
Perhaps just as telling were two trips last month to Georgia by Vice President Mike Pence. The state has become a source of nagging concern to Republicans, both because of the stakes in the presidential race and because there are two Senate seats up for election this year, including one held by a highly unpopular appointee, Senator Kelly Loeffler, who has been snared in a personal financial scandal.
The fact that any of those states is competitive at this point looms as a significant hurdle to Mr. Trump’s re-election. Should he lose a state like Georgia, with its 16 Electoral College votes, or Arizona, with 11, it could blow a hole in Mr. Trump’s map even if he were to hold other battleground states like Florida, North Carolina and Wisconsin.
Like many Republicans, including top officials in Mr. Trump’s campaign and administration, Mr. Stutzman, the strategist, saw the president’s impulses as a largely unfixable problem: “He’s too defective to have any other strategy than to be who he is,” Mr. Stutzman said.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/us/politics/trump-campaign-virus-protests-polls.html#click=https://t.co/ApvWyYF0Nd