NORTH HAMPTON, New Hampshire — Donald Trump hasn’t set foot in New Hampshire since he won the state’s GOP primary in January. His campaign hasn’t sent a high-profile surrogate here since the spring.

And now, even as they insist he can win here, some of Trump’s most ardent supporters in this blue-leaning swing state are openly saying that his campaign should focus its efforts elsewhere.

“This election is going to be won in those seven swing states” and not in New Hampshire, said Lou Gargiulo, who co-chairs Trump’s campaign in this state. “That’s where the effort’s got to be put.”

It’s a marked shift from when New Hampshire was among the bluish battlefields where Trump’s campaign boasted it could expand its electoral map as President Joe Biden faltered. Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley said days after the June debate that the party had started to “engage” in New Hampshire, Minnesota and Virginia. A post-debate survey showed Trump had erased Biden’s polling lead in the Granite State, leaving Republicans gleeful and Democrats spooked.

Today, New Hampshire stands as the latest sign of how Trump’s map is constricting in his run against Kamala Harris. A trio of surveys have shown the vice president opening an outside-the-margin-of-error lead over Trump — one that she aimed to cement on Wednesday with a campaign event at a brewery on New Hampshire’s Seacoast where she touted her new plan for small business tax breaks. Race raters have shifted the state to the left. And Republicans here are privately bemoaning the Trump campaign’s lack of investment in this state where Democrats outnumber Republicans in field offices by 17 to 1.

“The Trump campaign does not appear to be matching or contesting” New Hampshire, said Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist from the state and former Trump administration appointee.

“Organizationally speaking there have been no visits, no surrogates. They have their institutional support and they’re going to go with it,” said Bartlett. “Whereas Democrats, even with a lead, continue to flood the zone week after week with high-profile people.”

Trump’s campaign insists it is contesting New Hampshire, a state where he has thrice won GOP primaries but lost two consecutive general elections, including by 7 percentage points to Biden in 2020. Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for Trump’s campaign who hails from New Hampshire, said the campaign is “maintaining an offensive posture” here and in the other blue-leaning swing states of Minnesota and Virginia.

“They’re not in our target seven battleground states,” Leavitt said. But New Hampshire is “certainly a state we believe the president can flip red.”

But Harris sought to put Trump on defense on Wednesday, when she touted her latest economic plan to a crowd of more than 3,000 people who waited hours under the blazing sun to see the Democratic nominee — and slammed Trump’s stances on everything from taxes to abortion access.

“We will move forward because ours is a fight for the future and it is a fight for freedom,” Harris said. “And I don’t have to tell the folks in New Hampshire, the Live Free or Die state — you know the importance of individual freedoms.”

Trump and his allies seized on Harris’ visit as a sign that Democrats were concerned about their standing in a state that hasn’t voted red in a presidential election since 2000 and that prognosticators view as “likely” to vote blue in November.

“Comrade Kamala Harris sees there are problems for her campaign in New Hampshire because of the fact that they disrespected it in their primary and never showed up,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday. “I protected New Hampshire’s First-In-The-Nation Primary and ALWAYS will! To my friends in New Hampshire, get out and vote TRUMP.”

And he pledged to return to New Hampshire before the election while calling into a local radio show Wednesday morning.

“It’s a very important place in terms of winning this election. It could come down to New Hampshire. I'll be there,” Trump said.

But Trump put no date on the calendar. Meanwhile, in his absence, Trump’s campaign has not sent a high-profile surrogate to rally the troops here since appearances by North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum in April and Florida Rep. Byron Donalds in May — despite requests from the state GOP, according to a person familiar with the conversations granted anonymity to discuss the internal matter.

And his team has done little to expand its official footprint in New Hampshire since the primary. Trump’s campaign maintains its headquarters in Manchester and has “several” paid staff on the ground, Leavitt said — though she declined to specify a number.

“I’m not seeing any organized effort on Trump’s behalf, whatsoever,” said Fergus Cullen, a former New Hampshire GOP chair. “I’m not getting any phone calls automated or otherwise. I’m not seeing a county headquarters.”

Republicans affiliated with Trump’s campaign in New Hampshire argued they are fielding a strong grassroots effort for their party’s nominee in the state. The campaign runs training sessions for volunteers out of its Manchester office and online. Supporters have marched in local parades and staged a boat parade last month on Lake Winnipesaukee.

And there is some benefit to Trump staying away from New Hampshire — at least for another week. Should he visit before Tuesday, the former president would face pressure to put his thumb on the scale in the hotly contested gubernatorial primary. In that race, polls show former state Senate President Chuck Morse, who shares an adviser with one of the super PACs supporting Trump and who is running on his loyalty to the former president, trailing far behind former Sen. Kelly Ayotte.

But after Tuesday, “it would be good of him and [Ohio Sen.] JD Vance to show up,” said Sean Van Anglen, a Republican consultant in the state.

“I have hopes they can win in New Hampshire — but you have to be here. You have to go person to person, you have to have surrogates here, the candidate’s got to be here a few times,” Van Anglen said of the state that prides itself on putting even the highest-profile candidates through the retail-politics ringer. “I know it’s only four electoral votes, but it has played a crucial role in so many presidential elections.”

The paucity of the Trump campaign’s operations in New Hampshire is particularly glaring when contrasted with that of his rivals. Democrats have flooded the state with field offices and dispatched some of the party’s biggest stars — among them: California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and, over Labor Day weekend, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and California Rep. Ro Khanna — to launch canvasses and headline fundraisers. Biden visited the state twice after the primary — partly as a mea culpa after a bitter battle between state and national Democrats over the order of this year’s nominating calendar led the president to leave his name off the January ballot (he won the contest on the write-in campaign his allies waged on his behalf).

And on Wednesday, it was Harris’ turn to make the appeal. Standing behind thick panes of glass on a stage erected in the middle of a field ringed by bleachers full of eager supporters, she professed adoration for the state — “it’s so good to be back in New Hampshire” — and urged her backers to treat her campaign as the “underdog” against Trump.

“This race is going to be tight until the very end,” Harris said. But “we are up to the task. And with your help, we will win in November.”

Republicans are scrambling to prevent Hunter Biden’s conviction on felony gun charges from undermining their argument that the judicial system is being weaponized against Donald Trump.

They just can’t agree on how.

Trump’s campaign cast the conviction of his rival’s son on Tuesday as a “distraction from the real crimes of the Biden Crime Family,” while some hard-line supporters dismissed the proceedings as “fake.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson argued that Hunter Biden’s conviction “doesn’t” undercut Republicans’ claims of a two-tiered justice system because the evidence against him was “overwhelming.”

And still other Hill Republicans went so far as to describe the verdict as a “step towards ensuring equal application of the law.”

Republicans’ divergent responses to the verdict on Tuesday afternoon offered a real-time glimpse into the party’s struggle to reconcile what should have been a political win — the criminal conviction of the president’s son — with the guilty verdict rendered against their own standard bearer.

“It throws a bit of sand in the gears of people suggesting the Biden Department of Justice has been engineered to go after Trump,” said Jason Roe, a GOP strategist and former chair of the Michigan Republican Party.

But, Roe conceded, “one feature of the modern Republican Party is ignoring facts that don’t support the argument and sometimes embracing the conspiracy theories that do.”

Trump’s team made no mention of either Hunter Biden or the former president’s own legal troubles in its response to the Delaware jury’s decision.

“This trial has been nothing more than a distraction from the real crimes of the Biden Crime Family, which has raked in tens of millions of dollars from China, Russia and Ukraine,” Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a prepared statement. “Crooked Joe Biden’s reign over the Biden Family Criminal Empire is all coming to an end on November 5th, and never again will a Biden sell government access for personal profit.”

The statement appears to be a modified version of one initially provided to CNN, which included well wishes for Hunter Biden “in his recovery and legal affairs.”

Trump and his allies have long accused the president of profiting off his son’s business dealings, even as they have struggled to substantiate the charges. A GOP impeachment inquiry in the House has stalled. House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.), who has been leading investigations into Biden, called the verdict a “step toward accountability” but blamed the Department of Justice for not investigating his business dealings and providing the president cover.

The rendering of a guilty verdict against the president’s son less than two weeks after a jury convicted Trump of 34 counts of falsifying business records in a Manhattan criminal trial appeared to mollify other Hill Republicans — at least a little.

“Today’s verdict is a step towards ensuring equal application of the law, regardless of one's last name,” Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.) posted on X.

Rep. Josh Brecheen (R-Okla.) wrote on X that he is “glad to see that justice has been served. Nobody is above the law, including the President’s son.”

But others were conspiratorial, suggesting without evidence that the Department of Justice did not proceed with other cases against Hunter Biden that could potentially tie back to the president. Hunter Biden is facing a separate trial in California on federal tax charges. That case isn’t expected to go to trial until the fall.

The “gun charges are a giant misdirection,” former Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller argued in a post on X. “DOJ is Joe’s election protection racket.”

“Never forget DOJ tried to avoid this trial & verdict by giving Hunter a sweetheart plea deal. Until the judge exposed them,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) posted on X. Last summer, a plea deal with federal prosecutors that would have spared him from an election year trial fell apart.

And Charlie Kirk, a Trump ally and conservative commentator, warned his millions of followers on X not to “fall for” a “fake trial trying to make the Justice system appear ‘balanced.’”

Others tried to have it both ways. Kash Patel, a former national security adviser to Trump, said the verdict “demonstrates a fleeting moment of justice for all” — while also arguing that the trials of the former president and his rival’s son “expose the inequities in our legal system based on its weaponization.”

And then there was Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who said: “The Hunter Biden gun conviction is kinda dumb tbh.”

Biden said in a statement Tuesday that he “will accept the outcome of this case and will continue to respect the judicial process as Hunter considers an appeal.” He previously told ABC News that he would not pardon his son.

INDIANAPOLIS — Donald Trump’s problem with abortion politics was never more apparent than it was here Monday, as he delivered brief virtual remarks to a Christian advocacy organization that wants to ban all abortions — and didn't mention the procedure once.

For all his efforts to avoid the issue and “make both sides happy,” as he has long promised, Trump still got hit by both sides — from Democrats for appearing at all, and from some of his own voters in the room for skirting a topic at the top of their agenda.

“He sounded more like a politician who wants to be elected,” said Rick Patrick, the senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Sylacauga, Alabama. “I voted for him and I plan to vote for him again, but he was not like the other speakers who were here talking about religious things.”

In a pre-taped video address just under two minutes long to the Danbury Institute, which calls abortion “child sacrifice,” Trump did not mention the word “abortion” at all, even though the group’s CEO praised Trump in an introduction for addressing, as president, what he called “the most important issue facing our country and the next generation of our children who are being slaughtered in the womb.”

Instead, Trump told the group, “You just can’t vote Democrat. They’re against religion. They’re against your religion in particular.”

The former president’s brief remarks to the Danbury Institute, on the sidelines of the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, served as the latest example of the tightrope Trump is walking on an issue where polls show he remains vulnerable. Before the address, for which he was billed as a speaker, Trump’s campaign privately cautioned that he would only give a pre-recorded welcome message lasting less than two minutes. His address drew only polite applause and garnered some criticism among anti-abortion Southern Baptist leaders in attendance.

“It’s disappointing because you would hope to have a Republican presidential candidate who speaks strongly that life begins at conception,” said Kevin McClure, an attendee from a Baptist congregation in Louisville who said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whom he backed in the Republican presidential primary, was a better opponent of abortion rights.

Trump’s stated position on abortion — that the issue should be left to the states in the post-Roe era — is in conflict with the hardline position of the Danbury Institute. It is a major liability for him, even though he has taken credit for appointing the Supreme Court justices necessary to overturn Roe.

“The president is not dumb, and he recognizes just how lethal Dobbs was in the midterm elections. From a purely political perspective, I think both the president and even the Republican Party in general realize that where they have been is maybe not where people are, or at least the majority of Americans are,” said Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist and former Trump administration appointee.

But Trump also “cannot look like [he is] abandoning the religious right,” Bartlett said. And so he needs to “negotiate with the religious right, show that he understands them.”

Nearly two years out from Dobbs, roughly two-thirds of Americans continue to disapprove of the decision that felled federal abortion protections, according to a mid-April CNN/SSRS poll. And it remains a major issue for suburban women, a key voting bloc Trump has struggled with, according to a spring Wall Street Journal poll of seven swing states.

On the other hand, Trump may have found some middle ground with his stated position view that abortion rights should be left to states. Half of voters in a POLITICO-Morning Consult poll conducted after Trump cemented that stance in early April said they support states making their own laws about abortion access, compared to just 35 percent who do not.

On Monday, Trump’s video remarks came after nearly an hour of discussion earlier in the event about where the anti-abortion movement should be focusing in the post-Roe era — including restricting abortion pills and criminalizing women who receive abortions. Those policy measures would further curtail access to a procedure that is banned in almost all cases in more than a third of the U.S.

A Trump campaign spokesperson previously defended Trump’s appearance at the Danbury Institute, saying he “is committed to addressing groups with diverse opinions on all of the issues.”

But it came at a cost. President Joe Biden's campaign blasted Trump as a politician who “loves campaigning with abortion ban extremists.” And the Indiana Democratic Party joined in Monday morning, accusing Trump of “doing the bidding of the most extreme anti-choice groups in the country.”

Meanwhile, the former president disappointed many anti-abortion advocates still stung by his declining in April to endorse a national limit on abortion, saying that issue should be left up to state lawmakers and voters.

“We want to see abortion gone because it is a human rights issue,” said Tyler Murphy, an associate pastor at Southside Baptist Church in Fulton, Missouri, who supports a national abortion ban. “The federal government needs to protect its people.”

During an abortion-focused panel, Tom Ascol, senior pastor of Grace Baptist Church in Cape Coral, Florida, criticized anti-abortion groups for not taking bold enough positions on abortion since the fall of Roe. He and other speakers lamented the widespread accessibility of abortion pills, which have allowed people who live in states where the procedure is banned to terminate their pregnancies, and said that conservatives need to band together to work toward the complete elimination of abortion.

“Some of the pro-life organizations said, ‘Look, we've abolished abortion in America.’ No, we have not,” Ascol said.

And abortion was not the only issue on the religious leaders’ minds as was evident throughout the convention’s early proceedings. Prominent evangelical leader Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said that Christians have before them a “bigger task than ever before” as he touted a resolution that is being put forward at the Southern Baptists’ annual meeting voicing opposition to in vitro fertilization as typically practiced in the U.S.

“We're about to find out how pro-life the pro-life movement is,” Mohler said.

In the days since his criminal conviction in New York, Donald Trump has warned that placing him under house arrest would push America to a “breaking point.” He has suggested that if reelected, he could try to prosecute his political enemies. “Revenge,” he said, “can be justified.”

And at a rally in Arizona on Thursday, the former president declared that if he is unable to overturn his guilty verdict on appeal, “we are not going to have a country anymore.”

If Republicans had any hope of Trump tempering his hard-line rhetoric in an effort to win back more moderate voters he lost to Joe Biden in 2020 — something more traditionalist Republicans have pushed for — his post-conviction messaging shows the former president may be unwilling to do so.

“The former president is never going to get away from those components of his rhetoric,” said John Watson, a former Georgia Republican Party chair. “He has made a decision that this is how he wants to litigate this election.”

Watson’s “only encouragement is that there is a pivot, and he again talks about those issues that are going to decide, in the minds of the electorate, which person they choose is best to lead the country forward.”

Trump has little record of modulating in his political career. After his defeat in 2020, the riot at the Capitol and a GOP primary in which his path to the nomination has been lined with protest votes, some Republicans urged Trump to adopt a more conciliatory tone. Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, the only Republican to beat Trump in a primary this year, warned when she announced she planned to vote for him last month that the former president “would be smart to reach out to the millions of people who voted for me … and not assume that they’re just going to be with him.”

Such concerns are resurfacing in the wake of Trump’s trial in New York.

Asked about Trump’s rhetoric on the verdict, Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) said in an interview that Trump “should be conscious" of the impact it could have on voters.

“And I hope he is,” Bacon said. “Ninety percent already have their mind made [up], but that 10 percent is important.”

Polling immediately following the verdict in the hush money case suggests the trial may be a losing issue for Trump to harp on. A redo of a recent New York Times/Siena College poll, for instance, showed Trump’s 3-percentage-point edge over Biden before he was convicted shrank to just 1 percentage point when respondents were quizzed after the decision. Most Americans do not agree with Trump’s claim that the Manhattan trial was “rigged,” according to a CBS News/YouGov poll that showed 56 percent of adults believe the former president got a fair trial.

“Trump has not figured out how to appeal to more center-right voters, and I think he doesn’t think he has to,” said Sarah Longwell, executive director of Republican Voters Against Trump and publisher of The Bulwark. “I think he thinks that frustration with Biden and the economy is enough to sort of drive these college-educated suburban swing voters back to him.”

While “there is a little bit of that,” she said, “a lot of these sort of suburban swing voters will look at Trump and say ‘I can’t do it.’ Especially with the conviction — and not just the conviction, but Jan. 6.”

That bore out in a focus group Longwell conducted the day after the verdict with nine two-time Trump voters who were already unlikely to cast their ballots for him again. They saw the conviction, she said, “as just more confirmation of how unfit he is.”

Trump’s campaign pointed Friday to some polling in which voters do not appear to be defecting from Trump, saying in a statement that “the weaponization of our nation's legal institutions is a scam that voters are seeing through, and it will go down in American history as one of the greatest political miscalculations ever.”

And Trump is doubling down on that idea, taking his stolen-election rhetoric from 2020 and recasting it onto the judicial system. He began arguing that “our whole country is being rigged” from the moment he stepped out of the Manhattan courtroom last week. And he has since refused to take the off ramps provided to him by friendly interviewers, countering Phil McGraw’s charge that he doesn’t “have time to get even” by saying that while “revenge does take time,” it can be “justified.”

It’s the kind of heated messaging that helped Trump juice his base in his previous presidential campaigns. And it seems to be having the same effect post-conviction, with his campaign raising enormous sums of money from online donors.

“Look at his fundraising,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), a longtime friend of Haley who endorsed her in the GOP primary, told POLITICO. “People know what they're doing to him is wrong. Let him keep doing that. Let him put him in jail. See how that works out.”

Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.), chair of the Republican Study Committee, said he would not advise Trump to change his tone, arguing that independents and moderates “are concerned with the law — very concerned.”

“You have to state it as you see it,” Hern told POLITICO. “And he was the one sitting in the courtroom every single day for weeks, and had to be immensely frustrating.”

That frustration flared when Trump rallied Thursday in Arizona, a swing state he lost to Biden in 2020. Even there, he made little effort to expand beyond his fired-up base, instead demanding that an appeals court reverse his conviction.

“It is easy for Donald Trump to convince his most ardent supporters that first they stole the election and now they’re trying to put me away for good,” said Barrett Marson, a Republican strategist in the state.

But for the moderate, right-leaning independents Trump will need to win the general election, Marson said, “it’s incumbent on Trump to give them a bit more reason” to vote for him. “Talk to us about how you are going to bring down gas prices or bring down interest rates or bring down inflation.”

Anthony Adragna and Jordain Carney contributed to this report.