Road to 270: Electoral map already looks tough for Trump
Trump, who shook the last of his rivals weeks before Clinton locked up her nomination, has made the GOP's uphill path to the White House more treacherous by failing to seize on that head start in the race for the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency.
In the dozen or so states most likely to determine the race, Trump has made little progress building a campaign operation to match Clinton's sophisticated get-out-the-vote machine.
[...] it's narrow, given the map's opening tilt toward the Democratic Party, and hinges on Trump's ability to continue to defy political norms.
Trump will need to turn out white voters in the Upper Midwest in numbers that far exceed those in past presidential elections.
Trump insists the rules that govern past elections don't apply to his untraditional candidacy, and he offers his victory against 16 candidates in the GOP primaries as proof.
[...] before Trump tries to expand the electoral map, he must make sure he can protect the safely Republican states the 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney won.
[...] it's at odds with many Republican leaders, who believe the party's White House prospects hinge on appealing to the growing number of black and Hispanic voters.
"If the election were held today, there'd be a significant number of blue collar, whites — males particularly, but some females — who are registered Democratic and would vote for Trump," said former Gov. Ed Rendell, D-Pa.
Mike Baker, GOP chairman in Pennsylvania's rural Armstrong County, said hundreds of Democrats in his area voted in the Republican primary because of job losses in the region's coal mines.
A super political action committee backing Clinton featured some of Trump's most caustic comments about women in early television advertisements weeks before she wrapped up the Democratic nomination.
Trump has gone much further, declaring that some Mexican immigrants are rapists and criminals, calling for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and pledging to throw out all people living in the U.S. illegally before allowing "the good ones" back in.
[...] Trump angered his own party's leaders by raising a federal judge's Mexican heritage as a reason he might be biased in a legal case.
The comments were widely condemned as racist, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., publicly worried that Trump could push Hispanics from the GOP as Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee in 1964, did blacks in that election.
Both Trump and Clinton are seeking a holy grail of presidential politics: winning states that long have voted for the opposing party.
Wendy Davis, a promising Democratic gubernatorial candidate in 2014, was crushed by her Republican opponent by 20 percentage points.