With less than a month until Election Day, Democrats are looking beyond the traditional battlegrounds as new signs emerge that the fight for control of Congress could be spreading into states Republicans once had little reason to worry about.
Kansas and Florida are among the states receiving new attention, while President Donald Trump’s own campaign schedule is taking him into reliably Republican territory.
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The shift can also be seen in campaign spending.
Conservative groups have recently moved money from North Carolina, where the Senate contest was expected to be one of the year’s most competitive races, to Kansas as Democrats perform better in both states. Kansas has not elected a Democratic senator in nearly a century.
“Since Labor Day, the numbers have only gotten worse for Republicans,” said Kyle Kondik, a nonpartisan election analyst with the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
Florida is another state to watch.
Democrats are increasingly campaigning there even though the state appeared on relatively few lists of major battlegrounds earlier this year.
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Kondik said Florida could become an important early indicator on election night if Democrats are having an especially strong showing.
“That’s a state that counts very quickly,” Kondik said.
Trump, meanwhile, campaigned this week in Nebraska, a state he carried by nearly 200,000 votes two years ago. The president frequently calls polls fake, and Kondik cautioned that the current political picture could still be affected by inaccurate polling.
“I am always concerned about there being some systematic polling error,” he said.
Republicans currently hold 218 seats in the House, while the Senate has 53 Republicans and 47 Democrats.
Democrats need 51 Senate votes to hold a majority, while Republicans need 50 because the vice president breaks ties.
The final weeks of the campaign will help determine whether the activity in Kansas, Florida and other states marks a genuine expansion of the political battlefield or whether the fight for Congress ultimately returns to more familiar battlegrounds.
