Tim Kaine is putting Donald Trump on the defensive by campaigning in traditionally red states like Missouri and Idaho. | Getty Clinton sends Kaine into red territory Confident in their lead, the Democrats aims to force Trump to spend on defense.

When Tim Kaine lands in Jackson for a pair of closed-door fundraisers on Thursday, it won’t be because Hillary Clinton’s running mate is desperate for Wyoming’s three electoral votes.

The vice presidential contender’s trip west to raise cash is taking him to deep-red Idaho after a Wednesday stop in Missouri and reflects the Clinton campaign’s desire to plant a seed of doubt in Trump Tower about the shape of the electoral map.


“Part of what they want to signal is that she has so many pathways to 270 [electoral votes], and the more that the campaign moves toward November the more diverse those pathways get for Hillary and the narrower that path gets for Trump,” said Maria Cardona, a Democratic strategist closely aligned with campaign who was a top Clinton aide in 2008.

“That’s why you’re seeing the numbers in Georgia, the numbers in Arizona. Some of the allied groups have stopped running ads in Virginia and Colorado to signal that Hillary’s pathways to 270 electoral votes are opening up while Donald Trump’s are continuing to close down quite rapidly,” Cardona said.

Behind the scenes in Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters, the effort to force Republicans to pump resources into red states rather than traditional battlegrounds has been underway for weeks, breaking out into the open when the Democrats see fit to pounce on the national narrative of Trump’s implosion.

Clinton is now trying to unsettle Trump’s expectations in Arizona, Georgia, and Utah, states that — combined — have gone to a Democrat just four times in the last half-century.

Early last week, Clinton lieutenants whispered vaguely to Arizona and Georgia Democratic leaders that they would soon be seeing a new round of investments from the campaign — conversations that the Clinton team knew would leak. Then, the next day, Clinton had a surprise opinion piece in a Salt Lake City newspaper, followed one day later by a Bill Clinton fundraising stop in Park City. Draft schedules for both the former president and aspiring vice president have them swinging by spots that Democrats might otherwise not appear.

“They have an ability to go on offense with their media message and to pile onto this idea that the map is shrinking for Donald Trump and expanding for Democrats,” added Kevin Madden, a senior advisor to Mitt Romney in 2012, identifying the tried-and-true tactic at a time when cable news chyrons and swing state newspapers blare nonstop headlines about internal dysfunction in the Trump campaign.

"So when they’re doing routine fundraising in [traditionally Republican] states, they have the ability to do so because they don’t have to position their vice presidential candidate in battleground states in order to bracket the other ticket. They’re free to open up a new front."

In an ideal world for the Democratic ticket, every Clinton or Kaine event in a traditionally Republican or Republican-leaning state would set off alarm bells at Trump headquarters that would have his strategists scrambling to throw their limited time and money at states other than Ohio or Florida — which he must win to even come close.

Already this week, Trump has gone so far as to hire new operatives in Georgia, a state where President Barack Obama raised money for Clinton earlier this summer, where Bill Clinton is due to do the same next week, and where leading Democrats see a real opportunity to make inroads. His team this month requested ad rates there, too, as well as in other states most Republicans have not often had to worry about defending, such as Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, and Missouri. He’s even hired a pair of operatives in South Carolina, a usually deep red state where one recent public poll showed Clinton within striking distance.

Now, pushing deeper into Republican territory, Kaine’s fundraising spree is taking him to a trio of spots that are far from traditional Democratic fundraising hubs at a time when most vice presidential contenders tend to camp out full-time in swing states rather than scouring second- or third-tier campaign finance cities.

After a public-facing campaign swing through North Carolina, Iowa, and Wisconsin earlier in the week and a stop in Missouri on Wednesday, Kaine is due for one closed-doors event in Sun Valley, Idaho and two in Jackson, Wyoming on Thursday. Following his private stops in more traditional Democratic fundraising centers — eight total events in Portland, Seattle, San Diego, Los Angeles, northern California, and the Denver suburbs by Monday — he’s scheduled to be in Little Rock, Arkansas and Nashville, Tennessee for two more on Tuesday, according to fundraiser invitations obtained by POLITICO.

“There is no way that, even in a landslide, Idaho and Wyoming turn blue. [But] going to Idaho and Wyoming in the summer is not a bad idea to get fundraisers out of the way and mess with the Trump operation,” explained Monmouth University pollster Patrick Murray. "I could see this as a combination of, ‘Why not go to Wyoming in the summer? It’s where the rich people are [on vacation], you can do some fundraising there,’ and a head fake against the Trump campaign, which doesn’t seem to have an Electoral College strategy. So you could get them to spend resources in a place where they shouldn’t."

“This is really stretching it, because they feel that they can compete in Georgia and potentially Arizona,” he added. "So if they’re going to do a head fake, you might as well go big."

One obvious destination for this confidence play, then, is Missouri — a state where Kaine went to college and that Obama barely lost in 2008 but which has since continued to trend to the right. Much like Arizona, Missouri has a competitive Senate race where Democrats see real opportunity, giving Clinton operatives extra incentive to drill in or at least force Republicans to pay attention.

To that point, the biggest pro-Clinton super PAC, Priorities USA Action, has been actively polling those two states plus Georgia and Indiana while considering expanding their ad buys there.

While it’s hardly rare for campaigns to feint toward surprise states as a way of confusing or unnerving their opponents, it's uncommon for such an effort to emerge so sharply this early on. In 2012, for example, Romney threw resources at Democratic-leaning Pennsylvania and Minnesota, but not until late in the fall.

In 2004, Madden recalled, the President George W. Bush campaign also tried something similar to Kaine’s trip, visiting blue New Jersey — where polls were tightening slightly, and where they would get coverage in the battleground Philadelphia media market — in an effort to lure either John Kerry or running mate John Edwards away from swing states.

“It worked,” said Madden, then a press aide for Bush. “Edwards ended up decamping to New Jersey one day on the campaign, and when you have a race that’s [as close as] 2004, that mattered. That made a difference."

Kyle Cheney contributed to this report.