Donald Trump Has No Campaign Part 3

UPDATE:

According to this new story out from AP, the Trump campaign estimates that it currently has a nationwide field staff of 30 people. 30. This in a country with 50 states.
Trump is largely outsourcing what's typically called a campaign's ground game, which includes the labor-intensive jobs of identifying and contacting potential supporters. Ed Brookover, recently tapped to serve as the Trump's liaison to the RNC, says the campaign is making progress on adding its own staff in key states.

The campaign estimates it currently has about 30 paid staff on the ground across the country.

It is difficult to overstate just how many crazy notions are embedded in this package. No presidential campaign can really outsource its field operation to the party. That just means that the party has to build a whole additional field staff in addition to the one its already building (set aside not being able to control its strategy, quality of work etc.) That's not possible, or at least not possible to do well. The way this works in the modern campaign is that the presidential campaign has its field operation, the party has an additional field operation and they are coordinated together and in some ways integrated together in the fall for maximal impact.

The party, necessarily has more focus on all the other races besides the presidential. The presidential campaign mainly focuses on itself. But they work together (in the bounds of certain restrictions on coordination). And at the end of the day, every solid Republican voter who gets brought to the polls helps everyone up and down the ticket. Down ticket races are heavily, heavily dependent on these two massive field operations; they get pulled along with the wave of turnout these and other campaign committees coordinate.

Trump seems to have decided he's just not going to have one. Maybe he'll decide that's ridiculous and he wants to build on after all. But you can't just build a campaign operation overnight. And Trump is way, way behind.

Just to calibrate expectations, it's not like no Republicans will vote just because there's a weak field operation.

We reported last week Donald Trump Has No Campaign 

NBC News’ Benjy Sarlin, Katy Tur, and Ali Vitali had a great report this week that Trump “is a candidate without a campaign,” and it’s a problem that’s getting worse, not better.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Trump, who’s abandoned his promises about self-financing, finds himself “reliant on party fundraisers who haven’t all swung into action and aren’t always in sync with his campaign promises.”

This New York Times article today won’t improve the party’s confidence in Team Trump’s strategic thinking.

Donald J. Trump has hired a new pollster to help him capture an elusive Republican victory in New York, his home state, two people briefed on the move said.

The pollster, John McLaughlin, will be focusing exclusively on New York, polling to determine what type of climb Mr. Trump would face in a state that hasn’t voted for a Republican in a presidential race since Ronald Reagan in 1984.

Though recent polls show Hillary Clinton leading Trump in hypothetical match-ups in the Empire State, the Times article added that the Republican is nevertheless “adamant” about winning New York.

As for how, exactly, he intends to pull this off, Trump isn’t just hiring a pollster. Failed New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino, Trump’s campaign’s co-chair in the state, told CNN the campaign will prevail by “blanketing the upstate region with signs and bumper stickers.”

You might think I’m making this up. I’m not. Hitting upstate New York with yard signs is part of the campaign’s recipe for success in one of the nation’s most populous states. (Carl Paladino lost his 2010 gubernatorial race in New York by 29 points. I just thought I’d mention that.)

Note, the same CNN report added that Republican officials in North Carolina and Michigan are “yet to hear from” anyone with the Trump campaign, and the presumptive GOP nominee “doesn’t have so much as a state director” in battlegrounds such as Ohio and Colorado.

When Republicans talk about their anxieties surrounding Trump’s candidacy, they tend to focus on his rhetoric: he has an ugly habit of saying outrageous and insulting things that antagonize most of the country. But it’s important to remember that the scope of the GOP’s fears should go much further.

The Trump campaign has real financial problems as the general election gets underway, and what limited resources he has, the candidate wants to invest in things like New York polling – as if this is a state that’s within reach.

NBC News’ Benjy Sarlin, Katy Tur, and Ali Vitali had a great report this week that Trump “is a candidate without a campaign,” and it’s a problem that’s getting worse, not better.

Has anyone considered the possibility that Trump studied Campaign Management 101 at Trump U?