“President Trump’s outside political machine is setting a $300 million fundraising goal and is pitching major GOP donors on a plan to target six swing states that are likely to decide the 2020 election, according to people familiar with the group’s blueprint,” Politico reports.

“The pressure is high: America First Action super PAC and its allied non-profit, America First Policies, are part of a broader Trump political apparatus that Republican officials say will need to raise roughly $1 billion. Trump successfully raised money from small donors in 2016 but some major GOP givers remain wary of him.”

Eric Levitz: “In its latest report, the VSG illuminates one critical shift hiding beneath Trump’s sturdy support: He has lost significant ground with Obama-to-Trump voters. In the project’s 2016 survey, 85 percent of such voters held a ‘favorable view of the president.’ In its latest one, that figure fell to 66 percent. That may not sound like a lot, but, as we’ve observed, it won’t necessarily take a lot to change the course of history.”

From the report: “Even small movement among these voters — who represented 9 percent of voters in 2016 — may prove significant heading into the 2020 presidential election. Obama-Trump voters are also disproportionately white, non-college educated and, as a result, are likely to be well distributed geographically for the purpose of electoral impact.”

Joe Biden predicted that the field of Democratic presidential candidates would be “winnowed out pretty quickly” next year, dismissing concerns that a lengthy and contentious primary could weaken the party’s nominee, Politico reports.

Said Biden: “This field is going to be winnowed out pretty quickly.”

“President Trump’s re-election team is building out its political infrastructure with a round of hires that underscores the importance the Midwest and Florida are expected to have in the 2020 election,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“The campaign has carved the nation into nine regions… One of those regions is focused almost exclusively on Michigan and Pennsylvania, both states that hadn’t supported a Republican presidential candidate for 28 years until Mr. Trump. Wisconsin, which hadn’t supported a Republican for 32 years until 2016, is in a region that also includes Ohio, a traditional battleground.”

“One state is a region all its own: Florida, one of the nation’s longest standing presidential battlegrounds and among the country’s biggest electoral prizes, with 29 electoral votes.”

See the 2016 electoral map.