President Trump’s pitch to win New Hampshire and its many independent voters includes an appeal to law and order that the campaign hopes will edge out his Democratic rival Joe Biden in a state that was a “near miss” in the last election.
Trump lost the state to Hillary Clinton by a 0.4% margin in 2016, with 47.62% of the vote to Trump’s 47.25%. Only one state, Michigan, was decided by a smaller margin, that one in Trump’s favor.
Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien pointed to New Hampshire last month as among a handful of states, including Minnesota, Nevada, and Maine, that could be pegged as “near misses” last cycle. “He lost by 1,700 votes in New Hampshire,” Stepien said in an interview with Politico.
Stepien, who was the political director in New Hampshire for President George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign, told reporters in July that the Trump campaign had hired full-time staff in New Hampshire, as well as in Minnesota, Nevada, and Maine.
Voters in the state are notoriously independent: New Hampshire’s most popular party is “none at all,” with at least 42% of the electorate undeclared.
Some GOP strategists say that Trump’s law and order pitch may resonate with owners and employees of small businesses in New Hampshire’s small cities, who see their own communities reflected in places such as Kenosha, Wisconsin, where riots broke out after Jacob Blake, a black man, was shot by a white police officer last month.
During the Republican National Convention, Trump pitched voters in New Hampshire directly, pointing to Biden’s vote for NAFTA, support for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, and a decline in U.S.-based manufacturing that occurred amid Biden’s years in Washington.
Speaking to reporters before a campaign event in Nevada on Saturday, Trump said he was “doing really well” in the Granite State, echoing a claim from his first post-convention rally, held in Manchester, New Hampshire, where he told the crowd that he was “leading by a lot” in the state.
In 2016, Trump did not lead in a poll against Clinton in New Hampshire until late October.
A New York Times/Siena College poll published on Saturday gave Biden a 3 percentage point lead in the state among 445 likely voters. The margin of error for the poll conducted between Sept. 8-11 was 5 percentage points.
Saturday’s results come on the heels of a St. Anselm poll that surveyed voters before the GOP convention in August and pitched Biden ahead by 8 percentage points. This survey of 1,045 registered voters had a 3 percentage point margin of error.
The gap between the candidates continues to shrink from its widest point to date, a 13 percentage point Biden lead recorded by a University of New Hampshire poll first in June and again in July.
Ads scheduled to start last week were initially delayed until Sept. 15 and then were reduced in scope Monday, according to Advertising Analytics.
The Trump campaign on Monday also decreased advertising in Iowa and in Nevada, where the president held campaign events over the weekend.
A RealClearPolitics average of polls for the state has Biden ahead of Trump by 5.5 percentage points.
