#Lyin'Donald "lacks nearly all of the traditional campaign infrastructure required to get the electoral votes he needs." Isn't that too bad.

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THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN STILL HASN’T FIXED ITS MOST GLARING WEAKNESS
By Tina Nguyen, September 2, 2016

As a businessman, Donald Trump likes to focus on the big picture. He doesn’t pay much attention to details, instead claiming to hire “the best people” to handle such trivialities. This strategy has proved problematic, however, as a candidate for president, a job that requires deep knowledge of policy minutiae. Trump has also struggled to find and retain the best people, instead cycling through a series of campaign managers, leaving his skeletal staff disorganized and dysfunctional. The recent addition of former Breitbart executive Stephen Bannon and G.O.P. pollster Kellyanne Conway, whose political styles are often at odds, has not improved matters.

With just three weeks remaining until early voting is set to begin, Trump’s campaign still lacks a coherent ground-game strategy, according to a new report from Politico. Despite having had months to establish field offices throughout the country, the Trump campaign still does not have a presence in all 50 states. Even in several battleground states where Hillary Clinton now has a lead, Trump has failed to establish critical campaign infrastructure to register and canvas likely voters. According to PBS NewsHour, he has just 88 field offices in battleground states, compared to Clinton’s 291.

The glaring gap in professionalism between the two campaigns appears to be the result of dysfunction, rather than a lack of planning, at Trump Tower. Politico reports that the billionaire’s campaign had previously identified the states in which they needed to be competitive, and had drafted plans to open multiple new offices. But those plans, which the campaign hoped to execute in mid-August, stalled when then campaign chair Paul Manafort, who was about to finalize the campaign strategy, abruptly resigned amid revelations about his financial ties to pro-Russia interests. After Manafort left, staffers were reportedly unable to identify who was in charge of what projects at any given time, or who was even working on the campaign: it was only recently that Trump’s team was able to get control of its sprawling network of cable-news surrogates, requiring would-be Trump representatives to get approval from the campaign.

The candidate himself may be improving in superficial ways, modulating his rhetoric at times and reading off a teleprompter when instructed by his handlers. But in most of the ways that count, the campaign remains chaotic. Major conservative donors still haven’t opened their pocketbooks, and Trump’s ever-fragile relationship with the Republican National Committee remains on the rocks. The American public has lowered its expectations for the Trump campaign to the point where staffers’ feuds and inability to understand the basics of running a professional political campaign have faded into the background. But at a more fundamental level, Trump Tower is unprepared for the realities of Election Day, when campaigns and parties must mobilize tens of millions of people to go to the polls. And while Trump may be catching up to Clinton in some surveys, he lacks nearly all of the traditional campaign infrastructure required to get the electoral votes he needs. “It’s hard to see how the Trump campaign gets to 270 where they are today,” Russ Schriefer, a former Romney adviser, told Politico. “It’s not impossible, but it would take some external factor and some very lucky breaks for that to happen.”
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