A close look at Donald Trump’s campaign structure reveals one of the most comically amateurish operations ever assembled for a major-party presidential campaign. He only has 70 staffers–not even a fraction of the 232 on Hillary Clinton’s payroll. He has only recently hired a pollster, and his fundraising has been so anemic that he has been forced to mount a joint fundraising effort with the Republican National Committee.
However, MSNBC recently discovered just how amateurish the Trump campaign is. Just over five months before Election Day, the Donald has almost no presence in the biggest swing state of all–Florida.
It is literally impossible to overstate just how important Florida is in presidential calculus. Simply put, it is politically and mathematically impossible for a Republican to win the White House without Florida. As I mentioned earlier this month, any competent Democrat starts with at least 257 electoral votes–the Kerry states plus Iowa and New Mexico. If you add Florida’s 29 votes to the blue column, it’s goodbye, game over, sayonara. To illustrate just how dire the math is for the Republicans, under normal conditions they not only have to win Florida, but sweep every swing state to get to 270.
Trump locked up the GOP nomination a month ago. Even before then, his declaration before the Florida primary on CNN proved prophetic–his victory there ended any realistic chance for anyone else to win the nomination before the convention.
And yet, Trump presently has no infrastructure to speak of in Florida. Wadi Gaitan, the Florida GOP’s communications director, says that the Trump campaign is currently in “discussions” with state party officials about the kind of presence Trump plans to have in Florida. He did, however, hold out the possibility that Trump may simply rely on what the Florida GOP is already doing.
When Steve Schale, the man responsible for flipping Florida to the Obama column in 2008, heard this, he was mystified. He put it bluntly:
“While I have definitely been in the camp that Democrats can’t take Trump lightly, to try to run for president and to turn out voters without a ground game is clinically moronic.”
Schale pointed out what any political junkie should know–any campaign worth its salt needs a ground game to ensure voters who need to be “reminded, found, and prodded” to vote. While free airtime may have fueled Trump’s primary wins, he won’t have that luxury in the general election.
And if he thinks he can rely solely on the party to do it, he’ll be committing the same folly that John McCain did in my home state of North Carolina in 2008. Even when it was obvious that Obama was going to make a play for North Carolina, and even when poll after poll showed the race there was close, McCain’s ground game here was virtually nonexistent. Indeed, his North Carolina field operations were based in Tallahassee.
Two factors make this even more incomprehensible. One is that Trump has significant ties to Florida. He claims Trump National Golf Course in Doral, near Miami, as his biggest source of income, and he owns a home in Palm Beach where he frequently holds press conferences.
The other is that from last summer onward, Trump was openly threatening to bolt the GOP if he didn’t win the nomination. If he was serious about a third party run, wouldn’t you think he would have already set up shop in Florida? Combined with the fact that he wasn’t in a financial position to make a third party run anyway, it’s hard not to conclude that the Donald’s threat to bolt was just a bluff.
Contrast this with Hillary’s operation. She already has a significant presence in the voter-rich areas of Miami-Dade, Orlando, and Tampa Bay, as well as in Jacksonville and Tallahassee. She is also mounting voter registration drives and has already made a number of visits there.
In wave elections, some seats and states are more or less given away. If Trump is just having “discussions” about how much presence he wants to have in the biggest swing state of all five months from the election, you really have to wonder–could we be seeing the beginnings of a similar giveaway in Florida?
