In every losing campaign's postmortem, the analysts insist that the candidate should have gone where he or she did not. There were many complaints about Vice President Al Gore spending time in California late in the race when he should have been stumping in Florida in 2000 and I'm sure everyone recalls that Hillary Clinton was excoriated for taking Wisconsin and Michigan for granted in 2016 by failing to hold events there in the closing days of the campaign. Certainly, it's a general rule of thumb that in close elections the candidates are supposed to live in the battleground states, especially in the final weeks to eke out every last vote in the Electoral College.

Some very tight House races in those two states may very well be decisive as to whether Johnson or Democrat Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, currently the minority leader, will be the speaker in the next Congress.

So why in the world is Donald Trump holding rallies in the blue enclaves of California, New York and Colorado during the month of October? As far as we can tell, the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada are all close and various combinations of those states will be required to get to 270 electoral votes. Yet, for obscure reasons, Trump will be wasting time in the final few weeks of the campaign in these other states.

One explanation that's been offered is that Trump just wants to have rallies in highly populated areas because he gets bigger crowds simply because of the population density and he just loves those bigger crowds. After all, he's not going to win New Jersey but he had a giant rally there last summer that he can't stop bragging about. (I think the size of the crowd in his mind is probably up to a million people by now but it was actually about 30-40,000.)

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