Yard signs touting Donald Trump were not an unusual sight in Oregon during the 2016 presidential campaign -- once you made it outside Portland.

Even inside the state’s largest city, the Republican nominee had his backers. On Election Day, a Multnomah County sheriff’s deputy chanted “Trump, Trump, Trump..." over his vehicle’s loudspeaker while slowly driving past a line of Portlanders waiting to vote.

President Trump’s re-election campaign noticed the support.

Trump 2020, flush with cash and without a primary challenger it considers serious (sorry, Gov. Weld), is thinking about new worlds to conquer. And so it’s planning to put some money and time into Oregon, CNN reported Tuesday.

Large swaths of Oregon are Republican territory, but that’s mostly in the state’s rural and exurban areas. The population centers -- especially Multnomah County -- are overwhelmingly Democratic. Thus Trump’s 2016 general-election opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, won Oregon by 11 percentage points. Oregon’s governor and both of its U.S. senators are Democratic.

The president has acknowledged Portland’s well-established anti-Trump sentiment by tweaking the notoriously liberal city more than once since taking office. He condemned as “shameful” Mayor Ted Wheeler’s decision to have police take a hands-off approach when protesters blocked a local U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office. He also reportedly wanted to move a large missile-defense system out of South Korea and dump it in the Rose City. “F--k it, pull it back and put it in Portland!” he told then-National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, according to legendary Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward.

The Trump campaign apparently is concerned that it will have a tough time once again winning in Midwest industrial states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, especially if its opponent is former Vice President Joe Biden. And so it’s looking at “expanding the map,” which means targeting blue states like Minnesota and Oregon in hopes of finding a new path to the needed 270 Electoral College votes.

The Beaver State could be in play, an “Oregon Republican Party source” told CNN, because there’s “an ‘undercurrent’ of dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party [in the state] thanks to increasingly unaffordable housing in the cities, crime and homelessness, among other problems.”

A Trump 2020 staffer said the campaign plans to put some money and boots into Oregon this year to “test the waters.”

Is Oregon a long shot for the president? Yes, a very long shot. But the Trump team knows it definitely can’t win there if it doesn’t even compete.

Offered a Trump adviser:

"If we are a month out and a previous victory like Michigan is not possible, [it] would be nice to know other states are options."

-- Douglas Perry

@douglasmperry

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