title:  The Trump Camp May Have Just Thrown Out Every Crucial Swing State
text: Trump s campaign is continuing its ahem unorthodox methods following revelations that internal polling shows Trump s numbers are even worse than they re letting on. Less than five weeks before the election, the campaign has actually cancelled $1.6 million in ad buys in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida and North Carolina, as well as New Hampshire, Maine, Iowa and Colorado.Trump only has a couple of paths to the White House, and they all involve most of these states. He doesn t win these states, he doesn t win the election. End of, so why on earth would they do this when we re nearing the home stretch? A senior communications adviser, Jason Miller, tried to spin it as a strategic move, saying: Our data-driven campaign is shifting resources from over-performing markets to new battlegrounds w/in the battlegrounds. Buy is growing. Outsiders are skeptical, though. Dan Pfeiffer, who once served as Obama s communications director, said: This is what the professionals call horseshit. Pfeiffer could have said,  Total, utter and complete horseshit,  but he was probably being diplomatic. The Trump campaign claimed they were going to spend $100 million on ad buys from the beginning of September through the Nov. 8 election. They ve spent less than half of that, though, and part of the problem is questions about how the campaign plans to pay for all those ads.In fact, it s bad enough that outside groups are starting to pick up the slack. It s not likely going to be enough, however, and Republicans are actually expecting Trump to write himself another check in order to keep his campaign afloat.While it s true that they aren t pulling all the ads from those states and are supposedly keeping them in bigger markets, this smacks of the disarray in the campaign following Trump s series of worse-than-usual weeks. Furthermore, there is another debate coming up, and with Trump s horrible performance in the last one, the campaign may be rearranging everything it can in anticipation of a repeat performance, to try and mitigate the damage.Regardless, this could easily backfire on them.Featured image by Spencer Platt/Getty Images