Why is Trump coming to Salem? Here are two possible reasons

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Former and perhaps future President Donald Trump will be in Salem on Saturday.

Why? Virginia is not a state that’s considered to be in play. Shouldn’t Trump be spending the final weekend before the election in some place more consequential — Pennsylvania, for instance?

One of two possible answers may be the reason why West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice and — more importantly for crowd appeal — his “60-pound brown watermelon” of a dog, Babydog, were in Franklin County on Wednesday night. 

Here are two possible explanations for why Trump is coming our way at this late date in the campaign:

1. Maybe Virginia really is in play

There are polls and then there are quality polls. This year, I put a lot of stock in the pollster ratings by the FiveThirtyEight website. The most recent poll in Virginia is by Activote, which shows Kamala Harris leading 54% to 46%. That’s also an unrated pollster. Quantus Insights, a Republican-affiliated pollster, shows Harris leading by just 49% to 48%. That’s also an unrated pollster (and we should always be skeptical of partisan polls). I skip over both of those. 

YouGov is the fourth-best pollster, according to FiveThirtyEight. It shows Harris up 52% to 44% in Virginia. The Washington Post/George Mason University Schar School of Policy and Government is ranked 24th best. It shows Harris up 49% to 43%. If that latter poll is right, that’s good but not great for Harris. Joe Biden won by 10.1 percentage points. Maybe she’s poised for that; maybe she’s underperforming. We’ll see.

We get another quality poll Friday when the Roanoke College poll comes out; it’s ranked 32nd out of 250 pollsters. 

Until then, if you’re a Republican, you might look at that six percentage point lead in the Post/Schar School poll and think that’s within reach. I’m not saying it is; I’m just saying that Republicans may think it is. AtlasIntel, ranked 22nd in the pollster rankings, gives Donald Trump a five percentage point lead in Arizona, and Harris campaigned there Thursday. Based on all these poll numbers, if she thinks Arizona at five points is within reach, it’s reasonable to believe that Trump may think Virginia at six points is within reach. 

Ultimately, there’s no point arguing about which poll is right and which poll is wrong when we have the real thing coming up Tuesday. Here’s what we really need to know: If Trump is to carry ​Virginia, there’s only one way that will happen. He needs to overperform in rural areas. More to the point, turnout in rural areas needs to exceed expectations. That’s how Glenn Youngkin won the governor’s race in 2021; he ramped up rural turnout (although he also cut into Democratic margins in the suburbs, something Trump may not be able to do). In any case, this is why Youngkin and other Republicans have been pushing early voting. They don’t want to simply move the Republican vote from Election Day to other days; they want to use early voting to generate new Republican voters.

The early voting numbers in Virginia initially showed Republican congressional districts out-voting Democratic ones. Those numbers have since changed, now that satellite voting locations have opened in Northern Virginia and elsewhere. Early voting patterns now have reverted to what we’ve seen in previous years (I discuss this more in today’s political newsletter, West of the Capital). You can sign up here:

However, early voting has created what are likely new Republican voters. At a campaign event in Franklin County on Wednesday, Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, said his political consultant estimates more than 1,000 new voters have already cast ballots in the county — and that’s a 70% Republican county. “So that’s more than 1,000 new votes that Donald Trump didn’t get in Franklin County” four years ago, Griffith said.

A different Republican presidential candidate might have chosen the 2nd Congressional District in Hampton Roads or the 7th Congressional District in the Fredericksburg area for an appearance. Those are two swing districts, the former currently held by a Republican, the latter a Democrat. Republicans would like to pick up both to hold, and ideally expand, their majority in the House. Trump, though, is weaker in the suburbs than most Republicans. He won’t have coattails there. Republican congressional candidates there might be better if he stayed away. Trump’s only route in Virginia runs through rural areas, particularly Southwest and Southside. Griffith said that’s what he told Trump when the two spoke sometime late last year. “The key to victory in Virginia is the 5th, 6th and 9th,” Griffith said.

Republicans may be completely wrong in their reading of Virginia — we’ll see — but if they’re right, they are doing the things they’d need to do to win. They’re pushing early voting. They’re targeting “low-propensity” voters. Griffith said he has a text message campaign going out Friday morning to voters in his district who haven’t voted since 2020. He probably doesn’t need those voters for his re-election campaign but Trump would. In Lynchburg, Vice Mayor Chris Faraldi — who is working for the Trump campaign — has told me about efforts to reach low-propensity voters there, be it through text messages or door knocking or other methods. On Wednesday, a key Trump surrogate — West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice — took time off from his U.S. Senate campaign to make a campaign appearance for Trump in Franklin County. Justice’s route to the Senate seems so easy that he’s been spending a lot of time stumping for Trump in Pennsylvania. “I’ve been back and forth to Pennsylvania so many times I could be classified as a Pennsylvanian,” he said. But this time Justice went east to Virginia instead of north to Pennsylvania. “The country’s gone crazy,” he said. “We’ve got to turn it around, or we’re going to lose our country.” And now Trump himself is coming to the largest media market that reaches rural Virginia. 

I don’t know if Virginia is really in play, but the Trump campaign is acting as if it is. Now let’s look at the other reason why Trump might be coming to Salem.

Maybe this is about setting the stage for post-election challenges

Here’s a darker scenario: Trump is coming to Salem to prepare the country for challenging the election if he loses.

Trump is the only presidential candidate the country has had who hasn’t been able to accept a defeat. There’s sufficient evidence to suggest that Richard Nixon might have gotten cheated out of victory in 1960. Samuel Tilden in 1876 almost certainly was. There was nothing on that scale in 2020, but we know how badly Trump took those results. We now have at least one congressional candidate (John McGuire in the 5th) and at least one local candidate (Lynchburg City Council candidate Rodney Hubbard) who won’t commit to doing what once seemed routine: Accepting the election results.

Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but Trump’s Salem appearance was announced shortly after a federal judge halted the state’s purge of people from the voter rolls who checked, either rightly or wrongly, that they weren’t citizens. (The Supreme Court has since allowed the purge to resume.) Trump is in a position to come to Salem to rail against “cheating,” laying the rhetorical groundwork to challenge the results if things don’t go his way. 

By that reading of things, Trump’s audience isn’t really in Salem, it’s in Saginaw and Scranton and Sheboygan — and anywhere else. “See, Democrats tried to pack the voter rolls in Virginia, and we stopped them, but we didn’t stop them in . . .” Never mind that the voter case in Virginia is not nearly as big a deal as either side wants to make it out to be. The principles at stake are big, but as a practical matter, the number of voters involved is so small as to be inconsequential — see my column that explains why. That kind of calm perspective doesn’t make for good politics on either side, though. 

We’ll know Saturday what Trump has to say. 

We’ll know next week what voters have to say. Then we’ll know which one of these scenarios is right.