By Alexander Burns & Maggie Haberman @ NYTimes.com, June 3

President Trump is facing the bleakest outlook for his re-election bid so far, [....]

“There is no obvious strategy in terms of message,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican strategist based in California. “The president defaults to base messages regardless of strategy, thus the campaign becomes a base-driven campaign.”

Signs of anxiety inside the Trump team are evident across the electoral map. Over the past few weeks, the president’s operation has spent about $1.7 million on advertising in just three states he carried in 2016 — Ohio, Iowa and Arizona — that it had hoped would not be competitive at all this year. Much of that sum went to a concentrated two-week barrage in Ohio, according to the media-tracking firm Advertising Analytics.

The spending in Ohio startled many Republicans, given that four years ago Mr. Trump defeated Hillary Clinton there by eight percentage points [....]

A set of state-level polls released on Wednesday by Fox News found Mr. Biden leading Mr. Trump in Arizona by four percentage points, and slightly ahead of Mr. Trump in Ohio as well. The former vice president held a nine-point lead in Wisconsin, where Mr. Trump eked out a win over Mrs. Clinton in 2016 [....]

“I don’t think anybody will dispute the fact that if Trump loses Ohio, there’s no path at all,” Mr. Pickrell said. “We’re not going to be a tipping-point state this time, but I think Joe Biden can win here and I think the Trump campaign sees that.”

Polls released on Wednesday show another troubling sign for Mr. Trump: His numbers have flagged recently among white voters, driven by a continued erosion of support from those with college degrees. The latest Monmouth survey found Mr. Trump with the support of just 52 percent of white voters nationwide — five percentage points lower than his share in 2016, according to exit polls [....]