President Donald Trump faces political headwinds as he seeks to reclaim Michigan in 2020 but will enter Thursday night’s re-election rally in Grand…
President Donald Trump faces political headwinds as he seeks to reclaim Michigan in 2020 but will enter Thursday night’s re-election rally in Grand Rapids with at least one major legal threat behind him.
The first-term Republican has appeared reinvigorated in recent days after confirmation that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation did not establish collusion between Trump’s 2016 campaign and the Russian government that interfered in the election.
While it may be premature — Mueller stopped short of exonerating the president on possible obstruction of justice, and his full report has not been made public — experts predict Trump will tout the news in his first public rally since the report’s summary release.
The president will do so in front of thousands of supporters at the Van Andel Arena in Grand Rapids, a city where he capped his 2016 campaign with a raucous late-night rally and prediction of a victory few pundits had thought possible.
Like the president, Trump’s supporters “feel vindicated” by U. S. Attorney General William Barr’s summary of the Mueller report, said GOP strategist John Sellek.
‘It’s given them a huge boost of energy moving forward. So certainly, you’d expect the president to celebrate while he’s here in a state he needs to win again in 2020.”
While critics are calling for release of the full Mueller report, “I think Republicans are feeling emboldened by the results” of the summary, said Democratic strategist T. J. Bucholz.
“And I think that in a state like Michigan, that’s going to be such a battleground, that’s going to be a message we’re going to see from the Republican Party and from the president here.”
The visit will be Trump’s 18th rally in Michigan and his sixth in the Grand Rapids area since he began his campaign for president in June 2015, according to his campaign. It will be Trump’s first trip to Michigan since April 2018 when he rallied in Washington Township instead of attending the annual White House Correspondents Association Dinner.
Targeting Michigan
Trump is reportedly planning a massive re-election campaign that will target key voters in swing states like Michigan and Wisconsin that he narrowly won in 2016, according to the Washington Post.
The New York businessman won Michigan by 10,704 votes three years ago. He won support from 47.5 percent of statewide voters and topped Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by two-tenths of one percentage point en route to his Electoral College triumph.
The president will have a built-in advantage as an incumbent, but his re-election effort in Michigan will require “a pretty substantial effort to broaden out his coalition and reach out to college-educated suburban voters who abandoned the Republican Party in 2018,“ said pollster Richard Czuba of the Lansing-based Glengariff Group Inc.
