DM Monitoring
WASHINGTON: Candidates have become more active in the swing states as the US elections are near, making it impossible to avoid the rain of rallies and TV interviews as they look forward to grabbing the final winning votes.
So when Republican nominee Donald Trump announced an expansion of his campaign map into “deep blue” Democratic real estate that he has virtually no chance of taking, political analysts wondered what he was up to.
Trump, 78, is in Aurora, Colorado on Friday and California’s Coachella Valley on Saturday. Next week he heads to Chicago, Illinois and on October 27, he will appear at New York’s iconic Madison Square Garden, home of the NBA’s New York Knicks.
Colorado is the only one of those states to have voted Republican in a presidential election this century. It was the most competitive of the four in 2020, and it was still a cakewalk for Biden, who won by 13 points.
Meanwhile Trump and his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris are neck-and-neck in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada — where a few thousand wavering voters could determine who gets the White House.
So why put in time that takes you away from the Americans who do the hiring and firing less than four weeks before November 5?
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment but aides have pointed to a strategy of wooing voters in areas they say are hurt by failed Democratic policies.
Earlier, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is rolling out a new tax-cut proposal about once a week in an unusual rush in the final stretch of the campaign to sway voters in an election that could be decided by just a few thousand votes.
Trump’s parade of giveaways comes at a time when presidential hopefuls are typically busy fine-tuning existing proposals rather than making a host of new ones with little acknowledgment of the fiscal cost to be paid down the road.
Want to buy a car? Trump has a tax cut for you. Wish you did not have to pay taxes on tips, or working overtime, or your Social Security? Trump has proposals to help you there, too.
With a little over three weeks left until Election Day, both the former president and his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, are indulging in some economic populism to lure voters. Many economists say Trump’s promises, if fulfilled, are by far the biggest budget-busters.
Trump pledged in a marathon Detroit Economic Club speech on Thursday to allow consumers to deduct the interest on car loans, a plan he said would boost the U.S. auto industry. He did not mention the bill American taxpayers could be left footing.
Less than 24 hours earlier, he had promised Americans living abroad that he would end double taxation. Some American expats are required to pay taxes to both the U.S. government and foreign authorities.
Michigan, an automotive manufacturing hub, is a pivotal battleground in the Nov. 5 election and opinion polls show the race there between Trump and Harris to be neck and neck.
“He’s a salesman at heart, and one of his advantages in sales, as in politics, is that he’s unencumbered by shame or consistency or policy details,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist in Virginia who doesn’t work for Trump’s campaign.
