Trump launches three-day campaign rally blitz

President Trump is headlining three campaign rallies this week, part of a trip out west that includes both official and political events.

Starting Wednesday, Trump will hold rallies in Arizona, Colorado and Nevada over the course of three days as the 2020 campaign season accelerates.

The president will first rally supporters at Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, Wednesday evening, an event that coincides with the Democratic presidential debate in Nevada.

The Arizona rally is a sign of the Trump campaign’s effort to focus energy on a state that is now considered battleground territory. Trump won the state by less than a 4 percentage-point margin in 2016 over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

Trump’s trip to the western part of the country, scheduled to last through Friday, will be a mixture of official White House business and campaign appearances.

The president is slated to speak Wednesday to supporters and deliver remarks at a fundraiser luncheon in Rancho Mirage, Calif., and deliver a speech on water accessibility in Bakersfield, Calif., before heading to Arizona.

Trump is then expected to deliver remarks at a Hope for Prisoners graduation ceremony in Las Vegas on Thursday, after which he will rally supporters in Colorado Springs, Colo., that evening.

He will cap off his four-day swing out west with an afternoon rally in Las Vegas on Friday. That appearance will come on the eve of the state’s caucuses, when Democratic presidential hopefuls will also be focusing their energy on the state.

Trump has previously held multiple rallies in a single week, but this week’s three-day sprint represents an unusually large amount of time on the campaign trail for the president at this point in his reelection bid.

Trump has made a habit of staging campaign appearances in key primary states early on in the 2020 race, something that has allowed him to contrast himself with the Democratic candidates as he seeks to energize supporters ahead of the general election.

Trump lost Nevada by a 2-point margin in 2016 and his campaign has hopes of picking up the state this time around in November.

Ahead of Wednesday’s Democratic debate, the campaign took out a full-page newspaper ad in the Las Vegas Review-Journal that accuses Democrats of promoting job-killing “socialist” policies and seeks to contrast their proposals with Trump’s record.