Podcasts, Radio

Battleground Florida Podcast: The Horror of 269

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This week I joined Christopher Heath of WFTV for the Battleground Florida podcast. We had an excellent, wide-ranging discussion about impeachment politics, the democratic primary, and the 2020 electoral map. Check it out, subscribe, and throw Chris a follow on twitter while you’re at it.

Episode Info

Veteran political analyst Liam Donovan (@LPDonovan )joins the podcast from Washington DC where Congress is on recess, the President is on Twitter, and the Georgetown University Hoyas are getting ready for another season on the hardwood. Donovan works at a DC government relations and strategic communications firm, but his resume includes four years working to get Republicans elected to the US Senate. In this episode we’ll talk impeachment, the shifting Midwest states, shifting sunbelt states, what Trump needs to do in 2020 to win, is the Democratic field weak or strong, and what happens if the electoral college ends up at 269-269?

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TIME: Trump’s New Math: Inside the Plan to Flip Blue States in 2020

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I spoke with Brian Bennett from TIME Magazine about the Trump campaign’s efforts to expand the map in 2020.

Trump’s political strategists say they aren’t carving out a new path to 270 electoral votes and instead want to run up the score. In the 2016 race, the Trump campaign didn’t have the luxury of time or a huge war chest. “Last time we had a better air game than ground game,” Kushner says. “This time, we’ve had a couple of years to prepare. We’ve refined our data and political operation. We’ve invested $50 to $60 million over the last couple of years to make the data significantly better.”

Not everyone is buying it. Trump’s sagging job approval ratings suggest to many political observers that the map-broadening is a reflection of a search for a long shot way back to the White House. Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist, says that the Trump campaign is right to be trying to get more voters to show up and to branch out into new territory. “There are reasons to compete in all these places,” Donovan tells TIME. But, Donovan says, “he’s not going to win any of these places if he’s still at 43 approval in the RCP average,” referring the average of Trump job approval polls published by RealClearPolitics.

Read the full piece here.

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