Hey Look - A Whole Other Trump Disaster
ByJOSH MARSHALL
Published JUNE 17, 2016, 6:05 PM EDT
It's hard not to fixate on Donald Trump's string of galactic unforced errors on the campaign trail. But there's a whole different story playing out on the campaign mechanics front - and one that has Republicans rightly worried. 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 ...
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 ...
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/under-the-hood
= new reply since forum marked as read
Trump's appears to be, "Forget Mouth, Shoot Foot!" 
