In my head I've been thinking like a 30-40% chance that Trump loses Illinois by less than 10%. Whatever the final margins end up being, things definitely point toward Trump cutting into the margins in the big blue states.

Same issue in Oregon, though Chris Dudley got close in 2010.

State Margins to watch in terms of the popular vote: New York: Biden won the Empire State by 23% and 2M total votes. Florida: Trump won by about 350K votes in 2020, I expect he wins by at least 1M, could he push it closer to the 1.5M DeSantis won by in 2022? He won't win by the same margin, but turnout will be higher, so in terms of raw votes it's possible, but he would have to win the state by close to 15%, which is probably a stretch. Texas: Trump won Texas by 5.6% or about 630,000 votes in 2020. Polls have him up by about 8%, can he push the margin here to over a million votes. Illinois: Biden won the Illini State by 17% and 1M votes. I don't really know enough about the race here to speculate. California: This is a big one. Biden won by 5M votes! If Trump even cuts this to 4M it would make a huge difference. That might be an uphill battle.

State Republicans dont know how to win statewide races, especially when the Seattle suburbs are decidedly on the right side of the local political spectrum. I wish they'd look at how New England state level Republicans run as they generally accept that they can't associate themselves with a national narrative and focus on local issues. This does well against Dems as it mutes the "look what our guy is doing" compared to "look what I can do for you in your borough".

The southeast gets no breaks from hurricane season. Since this storm will cycle again next season it will likely be a devastating storm next August/September when he returns