...
The campaign has few offices, no ads, and people on the ground are confused about who exactly is in charge. The RNC is picking up the slack by running a robust field operation — but one RNC staffer acknowledged the organization could cut off the Trump campaign.
Besides the controversies, a core complaint with Trump is that his campaign is doing little to organize and mobilize voters, or assist the RNC’s efforts. Sources say the campaign is also beset by poor communication between different levels of the organization, and there’s confusion over who is calling the shots in various state organizations.
“They have had a lot of trouble integrating original Trump staff with new folks,” said one Republican operative familiar with the campaign. “And they have regional directors whose authority level is very unclear over states in their region.”
“I think there has been a level of the Trump campaign trying to come in and act like they are the big boys on the block as opposed to a partnership,” said one RNC staffer.
In key swing states like Florida, the campaign has been operating a bare-bones operation, with one office in Sarasota and four staff. The RNC currently has 75 staffers on the ground in Florida, as well as 1,400 volunteers and fellows in charge of local organizing.
“From the RNC’s perspective, if you’re looking at those states, we’ve been on the ground in those states since 2013,” said RNC spokesman Rick Gorka. “There was an early investment in the ground game to fix what went wrong [in 2012].”
Karen Giorno, the campaign’s chief Florida strategist, said that the operation will be expanding soon, and that the campaign is adding up to 25 more offices and is in the process of hiring 14 more full-time staff. The campaign is opening an office near the site of the Pulse shooting in Orlando, Bloomberg reported.
But Giorno sees less need for a traditional approach to the ground game because of Trump’s near-universal name recognition and the large attendance at his rallies, and she sounded confident about her approach when interviewed outside Trump’s Kissimmee rally last week. “I’m not big on bricks and mortar and office spaces because as you can see we have a very unique kind of campaign,” Giorno said. Giorno says she’s still relying on the large attendance at Trump’s rallies to reach voters. And she cited the campaign’s social media outreach, saying her team has a 100% response rate to social media queries from voters.
“This is the best type of outreach you can possibly have,” Giorno said of the rallies. “He’s touching over 40,000 people in two days.”
“I think we win this handily,” Giorno said. “I would be hard pressed to say that the Clinton campaign is doing anything to move the dial.”
In North Carolina, which Mitt Romney won in 2012 and where the most recent NBC poll showed Trump nine points behind, it’s unclear where exactly the campaign is based. The office in Fayetteville that had been used for the primary, where Trump held a rally last week, appeared to be shut down when a reporter visited it last week, and an office in Raleigh that had been used during the primary was being used by the local GOP but didn’t appear to be serving as a headquarters.
“The Trump campaign is in the process of moving,” said Dallas Woodhouse, executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party. “They do sometimes work out of my building but it is hit or miss.”
“In North Carolina, we have almost 50 paid staffers and more than 200 neighborhood team leaders across the state (in addition to the existing county and local party organizations and hundreds of volunteers across the state) — a number that grows everyday as our team members recruit and train more volunteers,” Woodhouse said. “Our team members function like paid organizers and field staff, as they commit to training, benchmarks, and hours of commitment each week to elect Mr. Trump and our Republican nominees in November.”
“Donald Trump started the general election with a head start on the ground because of the operation the RNC and the NCGOP has built,” Woodhouse said.
One key North Carolina Republican activist had a much less rosy view of the situation.
“It is less than to be desired,” the activist said. “I think the RNC is doing a really good job from a field program. They are taking a huge role. He’s also keeping it pretty lean. We’re going to see if this theory works.”
“You can’t just come to a rally once a week and go on CNN, that’s crazy,” the activist said.
...