President Donald Trump hasn’t given up on New Hampshire.
The president’s re-election campaign announced that Trump will return to the state this weekend for a rally Sunday at 1:30 p.m. at a private aviation company’s hangar adjacent to Manchester-Boston Regional Airport. It’s the same venue where the president held his last rally in the Granite State on Aug. 28 – when Trump made New Hampshire his first campaign stop following the conclusion of the Republican National Convention the night before.
The president’s arrival comes just days after Vice President Mike Pence spoke to supporters Wednesday outside a hangar at the airport in Portsmouth.
The stops by the president and his running mate are perplexing to some.
While the state’s been a general election battleground for at least a generation, the three public opinion polls conducted in New Hampshire this month indicate Trump trailing Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden by double digits. The former vice president topped Trump by 12 points in a University of New Hampshire Survey Center poll, 10 points in a Boston Globe/Suffolk University survey, and 12 points in a Saint Anselm College Survey Center poll.
At the beginning of the week, New Hampshire was left out of the 10 key battleground states targeted in the campaign’s closing ad-blitz, which called into question whether the Trump campaign still considered the Granite State in play.
But supporters of the president point back to four years ago, when Trump closed the gap in the final two weeks. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton led Trump by 8.5 points 14 days before the 2016 election, according to an average of the surveys at the time compiled by Real Clear Politics. But by the eve of the election Clinton’s lead had all but vanished and she ended up winning the state by just, 2,700 votes, the closest popular vote margin of all 50 states.
“We 100% feel like New Hampshire is still in play,” the Republican National Committee’s Nina McLaughlin told the Monitor.
“We lost by a tight margin in 2016 and we’ve had an epic ground game for over a year now for this cycle,” said McLaughlin, the RNC’s spokesperson for New Hampshire and Maine. “We just surpassed over 2 million voter contacts in the state yesterday and we know that we’ve put in the work and we know that we can win the state and we don’t believe the polls.”
But longtime New Hampshire Democratic Party Chair Ray Buckley hopes Trump’s trip will backfire.
“So far every time Donald Trump’s come to New Hampshire, it’s energized our people a lot more than the Republicans,” Buckley said. “It’s certainly a great reminder to our folks of what we’re up against.”
While the president’s campaign isn’t going up with TV spots in New Hampshire in the closing week and a half, it is airing ads in Maine’s Second Congressional District.
It’s been 32 years since a Republican carried Maine in the race for the White House. You have to go all the way back to then-Vice President George H.W. Bush in 1988. But Maine is one of only two states – along with Nebraska – that divides its electoral votes by congressional district – and Trump won the state’s more rural Second District four years ago.
The Trump-Pence ticket topped 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton by 10 points in northern Maine, giving Trump an extra electoral vote. Clinton captured the First Congressional District by nearly 15 points and narrowly carried the statewide vote to win three electoral votes. An average of the most recent polls in Maine indicates Biden far ahead in the statewide battle but show a deadlock in the Second District.
Trump national campaign manager Bill Stepien, on a call with reporters on Friday, pointed to Sunday’s New Hampshire stop and teased that Trump may head over to the Pine Tree State.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if we add one additional stop while he’s in that neck of the woods,” Stepien said.
The president’s potential stop in Maine would come four days after Pence held a rally near Bangor on Wednesday.
Neither Biden nor his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris of California, have stopped in New Hampshire during the general election. But their spouses – Jill Biden and Doug Emhoff – campaigned in the state last month.
Emhoff returns to New Hampshire on Saturday. He’ll team up in Manchester at 10:15 a.m. for a get-out-the-vote literature drop event with Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, First Congressional District Rep. Chris Pappas, Manchester Mayor Joyce Craig, and state Senate Majority Leader Dan Feltes, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee running against Gov. Chris Sununu. Shaheen is running against Bryant “Corky” Messner in her bid for a third six-year term in the Senate. Pappas is trying to fend off a challenge by former political operative Matt Mowers.
The Democratic vice presidential nominee’s husband then heads to Concord where he’ll team up at noon with U.S. Rep. Annie Kuster for a “Vote Now and Volunteer” get-out-the-vote literature drop. Kuster is facing Steve Negron in a rematch of the 2018 race.
The New Hampshire Secretary of State’s Office reported this week that 200,834 absentee ballots have been requested so far for the general election and that 136,137 ballots have already been returned.
The number returned already far surpasses the 75,305 absentee ballots cast in New Hampshire during the entire 2016 general election. Absentee ballots accounted for roughly 10% of the 2016 turnout in the state.
Granite Staters can request an absentee ballot until 5 p.m. on the day before the Nov. 3 election. To count, ballots have to be received by a city or town clerk by 5 p.m. the day of the election, either through the mail or by dropping them off at selected polling places across the state that have official ballot boxes.
So when will election officials begin to count this record-breaking amount of absentee ballots?
Thanks to a bill passed at the end of June by state lawmakers, pre-processing of the ballots can be performed on the Thursday, Friday, Saturday or Monday before the Nov. 3 election.
“That allows the moderators and clerks to open the outer envelope and look at the affidavit envelope that actually contains the ballot and make sure the voter signed the affidavit and make sure everything else is in order,” deputy secretary of state David Scanlan said. “If they find defects, they have an opportunity to contact the voter so the defect can be cured.”
Officials will start counting absentee ballots when the polls close on Election Day.