Rachel Maddow devoted a substantial amount of time on her MSNBC show on Friday night to discuss Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s trip to Portland, Maine.
Maddow tried to comprehend the purpose of the trip, because as far as she’s concerned, it’s electoral suicide.
To summarize where Trump stands in the presidential race right now; the latest national polls show Trump being down by 9 points (Wall Street Journal National poll), down 10 points (Fox News poll), down 4 points (Reuters national poll), and down 15 points (McClatchy-Marist poll). So how can Maine help Donald Trump win the race?
Well, she explained, as the country votes state-by-state, the interesting states for campaigning are the swing states. But in the latest polls, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is leading in Florida by 6 percentage points, Pennsylvania by 11 points, Michigan by 9 points, and New Hampshire by 17 points.
Maddow summarized hilariously, that those swing states should be the focus of Trump’s campaign, and not Maine, because his low poll numbers translates as:
“A campaign on fire, that is sinking into a lake, that is also on fire, and the fire truck that just showed up to help is on fire, and what’s shooting out of it’s fire hose is more fire. You’re just cooked!”
Maddow could hardly refrain from laughing when she concluded:
“You have to fix that. In the swing states. And so, in the face of those horrific swing state numbers, Donald Trump spent the day today in Maine.”
However, theoretically, Maine has something which could be useful for Trump. Two states have a free-floating electoral vote; one congressional district which awards its electoral vote separately from the others, and Maine is one of those states. Even though historically, that vote has never parted from rest of the state’s votes before, technically, it could.
The only problem is that to get that vote, Trump would have to go campaigning in Bangor, and not in Portland.
Watch Rachel Maddow’s full segment on MSNBC here:
Featured image screengrab from YouTube.
