Michigan seems like a bit of an odd place for Trump to spend money given that the RealClearPolitics average of polls in the state puts him behind Hillary Clinton by 8.2 percentage points. And of the 19 polls conducted in the state testing Clinton vs. Trump, the Republican has led in exactly one — a survey conducted more than a year ago.

But Trump's spending in Michigan only seems odd in a vacuum. When you compare it with the other states where he is advertising, his problem becomes clear. Here they are — with the RCP polling average in parentheses:

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Colorado (Clinton +11.8)

Florida (Clinton +2.7)

Michigan (Clinton +8.2)

North Carolina (Clinton +1.7)

Ohio (Clinton +3.8)

Pennsylvania (Clinton +8.2)

Virginia (Clinton +13)

What you see is that the map of potential Trump opportunities is very limited. For all of the talk of Trump's surprising competitiveness in places like Nevada and Iowa, those are mere trifles compared with his deficits in Florida, Ohio, Virginia and Colorado.

Let's go through the numbers behind that hard reality for Trump. This is what the electoral map looked like the last time we handicapped it:

That map gives Clinton 273 electoral votes to Trump's 175 with the remaining 90 contained in the six toss-up states marked in gray. Even if Trump wins all six of those toss-ups — and he's behind in every single one of them today — he still loses to Clinton. So, yeah.

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Finding a way to make Michigan's 16 electoral votes (and Pennsylvania's 20) more competitive is the only path that Trump has to winning at this point. If he can't, he loses. Period.

And, as of today, there is very little reason to believe that Trump is on the march in either Pennsylvania or Michigan — or any other state colored blue in the map above. In Stu Rothenberg's definitive takedown of Trump's blue-state strategy published Tuesday morning, he writes:

With Trump performing poorly in both Colorado and Virginia and not yet making large Rust Belt states competitive, it is hard to see the Republican nominee being able to put together enough electoral votes to win the White House. Even adding Florida, Ohio, Iowa and Nevada to Romney’s 2012 vote would leave Trump short of the 270 electoral votes he would need for victory. A solid Clinton electoral vote victory looks to be the most likely outcome, with her floor probably somewhere near Obama’s 332 electoral vote total against Romney.

That's right. If you give Clinton all six of the current toss-up states — reminder: she is ahead in polling in all of them — she wins 363 electoral votes. That would be nearly equal to the 365 that then-Sen. Barack Obama won in 2008 and within shouting distance of the 379 electoral voters Bill Clinton won in his near-landslide in 1996.

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Even if Clinton wins only the three smallest — by electoral votes — states that we rate as toss-ups (North Carolina, Nevada and Iowa), she still gets to 300 electoral votes, a more comfortable margin than George W. Bush won in either 2000 or 2004.