With three and a half weeks until Election Day, former President Trump will hold a rally in Southern California on Saturday.

His campaign also announced this week that the Republican presidential candidate will hold a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City later this month.

Trump stopped in Colorado on Friday and was expected to parachute to Illinois on Tuesday.

It’s been 40 years since a Republican won New York in the presidential election, 36 years since California and Illinois turned red in a White House race, and 20 years since the Republican Party captured Colorado.

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Former President Trump speaks during a rally in Uniondale, New York, on September 18. (Julia Bonavita/Fox News Digital)

With time at a premium for the presidential campaigns in the final stretch of a White House showdown in a race for the margin of error with Vice President Kamala Harris, many are wondering why Trump is stopping in blue states, where his chances of winning wearing are extremely thin to non-existent.

“We just rented Madison Square Garden. We’re going to make a play. We’re going to make a play for New York. Hasn’t been done in a long time. It hasn’t been done in decades.” Trump said at a rally in Pennsylvania this week, hours after his campaign announced the date in New York City.

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“We play for New Jersey. We are playing for Virginia,” Trump continued, before adding that he also plans to compete in Minnesota and New Mexico.

Despite the former president’s bravado about expanding the electoral map, the latest Fox News Power Rankings in the 2024 presidential election rank New York, New Jersey, California and Colorado as solidly Democrat, with Minnesota, New Mexico and Virginia as likely blue .

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Trump will headline a rally on Saturday in Coachella, a city in California’s Riverside County southeast of Palm Springs that is best known nationally for a music festival held nearby each April.

“President Trump’s visit to Coachella will highlight Harris’ poor record and demonstrate that he has the right solutions for every state and every American,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement.

The Coachella stop could also benefit Trump, as Latino voters — who have been trending toward the Republican Party in recent years — not only in Southeast California, but more importantly in neighboring Arizona and Nevada, two of the seven crucial battleground states which will likely determine whether the former president or Harris wins the 2024 election.

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Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden on October 27 will be his third major campaign event this year in Democratic-dominated New York.

Last month he packed the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, just outside New York City. And he drew thousands of people at a rally in New York’s Bronx neighborhood in May.

He also held a large coastal rally in New Jersey in May.

Former President Trump gestures during a campaign rally in Wildwood, New Jersey, on May 11. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

“By choosing high-impact institutions, the media cannot look away and refuse to discuss the problems and the solutions that President Trump offers,” a senior Trump campaign adviser told Fox News when asked about the strategy to address the October to keep events in blue. states. “We live in a nationalized media environment and the national media’s attention to these large-scale, outside-the-norm situations extends the reach of its message across the country and reaches into every battleground state.”

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Longtime Republican strategist Jesse Hunt, a veteran of several Republican Party presidential campaigns, noted that these stops in blue states are less about geography and more about message.

“Trump creates a lot of unique and interesting contrast situations that can then be broadcast to large audiences in states they care about,” Hunt said. “You have to create compelling stories and convincing contrasts. I think that’s part of what Trump does.”

Hunt argued that Trump is a pro “at creating these moments that invade our fragmented media environment” and that “voters in Georgia, voters in North Carolina, will certainly consume news about Trump’s event at Madison Square Garden.”

Former President Trump speaks during a campaign rally in New York City’s South Bronx on May 23. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)

Referring to veteran campaign strategists Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, who are steering Trump’s 2024 campaign, Hunt said they are “a pretty smart team… and they won’t waste his time.”

Veteran Republican strategist Matthew Bartlett agreed that “we are at a point where everything is being nationalized.”

He argued that the events in Trump’s blue state “will spin a whole news cycle. It will give his supporters talking points. And I think there is admiration for going into the belly of the beast, for your opponent’s territory to enter.”

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Bartlett added that “of course there is a downside.”

“If this strategy proves ineffective in the final days, it could be similar to what Hillary Clinton did, where she mismanaged her time in the last few days of 2016 by not being in the critical swing states, not on to be places where you have to increase turnout,” he warned.

Get the latest updates from the 2024 campaign trail, exclusive interviews and more on our Fox News Digital election hub.