The Electoral Explanation

President Trump appears to be moving the RNC convention to Florida. This is surely about the electoral college more than anything else. If the president holds the Republican base states he has 230 electors. He must win the 29 in Florida. Then he need only 11 more, and can compete and/or take his chances in: Wisconsin plus Omaha (11); Wisconsin plus northern Maine (11); Michigan; Pennsylvania. These are not in his base. They are contestable. Biden is hardly or not meaningfully ahead in these states. So that's the Trump strategy. 

He cannot stand to lose North Carolina or Arizona. They are part of the base of 230. If he loses those states, he has no path to 270. So he has to trust the Republican establishment in those states to deliver victory.

Arizona is interesting. If Trump-disparaged Republican Senator Jeff Flake were to campaign against Trump, that might help the Democrats take the state. If that occurred Trump is very unlikely to win the electoral college. 

It should not go without saying that Trump is not going to win the national popular vote. His presidency has been based on an electoral, not a popular vote, strategy. That is why his approval rating nationally has never been above 50%, save for a week or two in a few polls. He obviously won with that approach in 2016 and has chosen not to choose policies, programs, or personal presentations directed towards winning a broad, popular base. 

Trump made that choice before the pandemic and the pandemiconomy jeopardized his talking points of economic success and general progress. Now he has not changed. Instead, he is intensifying his divisive approach, which of course is only plausible as a strategy because the electoral college makes the national appeal of any candidate not so much irrelevant as merely insignificant. 

Why would a president not rename Forts Bragg, Hood, and A.P. Hill if only to pick up a few votes from those not wholly unsympathetic to Black Lives Matter supporters? Other than inflexibility, the explanation must be that turn-out from a fervid base is presumed to be the way to win the swing states at issue. There have to be more, in the Republican/Trump calculus, more in Wisconsin who will be motivated to vote for Trump because of his intransigence on, inter alia, Confederate flags and generals and statues than there are Cheeseheads (a term of endearment in my family's home state) who think that a more tempered, tolerant person should be president. Only the electoral college system permits, indeed requires, such calculations. The national mood is clear. The attitudes in Wisconsin and Omaha, less so.