3 big hurdles Trump faces in his bid to win back Wisconsin: From the Politics Desk

Welcome to the online version of From the Politics Desk, an evening newsletter that brings you the NBC News Politics team’s latest reporting and analysis from the campaign trail, the White House and Capitol Hill.

In today’s edition, national political correspondent Steve Kornacki breaks down Donald Trump's challenges in Wisconsin as he returns to the state. Plus, NBC News has new reporting on how the GOP's mail voting push keeps running into the same obstacle: the former president.

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3 big hurdles confronting Trump in Wisconsin this fall

Analysis by Steve Kornacki

Donald Trump is in Wisconsin today for a rally that coincides with the state’s presidential primary but that his campaign is billing as the launch of its general election effort in one of 2024’s premier battlegrounds.

The Badger State is, along with Michigan and Pennsylvania, one of the three Big Ten states that flipped to Trump in 2016 after backing Democrats for decades. All three returned to the Democratic fold in 2020, cutting off Trump’s path to re-election.

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Of the three, Wisconsin may offer Trump his best chance of clawing back lost ground. Joe Biden’s margin of victory in the state was just 20,682 votes (or 0.6%), narrower than both Michigan (154,188 votes) and Pennsylvania (80,555 votes). If Trump can win Wisconsin back, he could then claim the presidency by reversing tight losses in Arizona (10,457 votes) and Georgia (11,779 votes). These three states, with no other changes to the map, would bring Trump to 272 electoral votes.

Trump suffered a net loss of 43,430 votes in Wisconsin from 2016 to 2020. The 2020 results reveal three clear hurdles there