President Trump is scheduled to return to New Hampshire on Sunday for what is likely to be his last campaign stop — win or lose — in the state that gave him his first-ever political victory.
Even though Granite Staters gave him a 20-point win in the 2016 primary, and his narrowest state loss in the 2016 general election, New Hampshire doesn’t seem to be giving him as warm of a political embrace this year.
Trump has never led a poll in the Granite State all year. In a Suffolk University/Boston Globe survey earlier in the month, former vice president Joe Biden led Trump, 51 percent to 41 percent among likely New Hampshire voters.
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“The President’s visit seems to be based more on sentiment than strategy. Sometimes losing candidates take nostalgia trips to where it all started, as John McCain did to New Hampshire in the last days of his 2008 campaign,” said Dante Scala, a political science professor at the University of New Hampshire.
After winning the New Hampshire primary twice — in 2000 and 2008 — McCain lost the state in the 2008 general election to Democrat Barack Obama by over 9 percentage points.
Beyond mere sentiment, the Trump campaign has long held out hope that New Hampshire and Minnesota are among the few places on the Electoral College map where they could go on offense.
Yet Trump has all but given up on Minnesota in the last month, not visiting in weeks and not running television ads.
And other than on national cable channels, the Trump campaign has not run television ads in New Hampshire in months, while Biden’s campaign spent $2.5 million on television advertising aimed at New Hampshire voters and is scheduled to spend another $500,000 in the final week, according to the media tracking firm Advertising Analytics.
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That said, the Trump campaign is the only one that has fully embraced routine Granite State campaign events. Trump is expected to hold a 1 p.m. rally on the grounds of the Manchester Regional Airport in Londonderry, the same location where he held a similar rally in late August.
A spokesman for Governor Chris Sununu, a Republican, said Saturday afternoon it was unclear whether the popular chief executive would attend the rally, but that “he’ll make every effort.” During the president’s last visit, Sununu greeted Trump at Air Force One, but did not attend the rally itself because of what he said were COVID-19 precautions.
The Sunday trip comes less than a week after Vice President Mike Pence’s campaign rally in Portsmouth and an Eric Trump event in Manchester.
Nearly every week since August, some member of the Trump administration has just happened to hold an official visit to the state. This includes figures like First Lady Melania Trump, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Deborah Birx and many less high profile roles like the administrator of the Small Business Administration Jovita Carranza.
Meanwhile, Biden hasn’t been in New Hampshire since he skipped town early on the day of the New Hampshire primary. His vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris hasn’t been to the state in well over a year, but her husband, Doug Emhoff, visited New Hampshire on Saturday to help campaign workers who were knocking on doors.
James Pindell can be reached at james.pindell@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @jamespindell.
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