Team struggles

Trump team struggles with candidate who won’t adjust

Lost endorsements and partially filled venues mark a campaign unwilling to boost investment in New Hampshire.

By Ben Schreckinger

Six days ago, as his 2016 rivals scavenged from the carcass of Rand Paul’s failed bid, Donald Trump’s New Hampshire co-chairman sat down with several prominent Paul supporters at the State House in Concord.

The group, which included state Reps. Eric Eastman and Max Abramson, was eager for Trump to earn their support by going on the record against Medicaid expansion, an issue that comes before the New Hampshire Legislature this week. Conversations with the campaigns of Trump’s rivals had paid dividends: Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz delivered detailed, on-video condemnations of state Medicaid expansion in response to questions at local events.

Trump’s state chair, Andrew Hemingway, said he thought he could get his boss to weigh in at a rally Thursday in Portsmouth, according to a person at the meeting.

But the next night, Trump took a pass. “I want to get rid of Obamacare and get you something great,” Trump vaguely offered. “We have some people that won’t be able to live. We have to help people. Don’t we have to help? What are we going to do, let them die in the street?”

One of the Paul supporters messaged Hemingway: What gives? The mogul’s state co-chair replied with an electronic shrug; he doesn’t write Trump’s speeches.

Trump lost those endorsements to Cruz. And it wouldn’t be the last time the New York billionaire’s insistence on running the campaign on gut instinct would cost him in the final stretch to today’s primary. Despite a poll-defying loss in the Iowa caucuses a week ago that halted his momentum, Trump is disregarding his aides’ advice and yielding only slightly and ever so grudgingly to the typical demands of a White House bid.

He remains the favorite to win Tuesday night’s primary, though Republicans in the state expect he will fall short of the 20-plus point lead he has touted on the stump. And that’s at least partly due to a refusal to invest in analytics and organizational capacity on the ground — a structural deficit he suffers beyond New Hampshire.

"Folks inside the tent have said worryingly that Trump is charting his own course,” said one New Hampshire Republican.

The day after the Portsmouth rally, Trump’s insistence on doing things his own way led to another miss. The businessman was scheduled to hold a town hall in Londonderry, but preferring to spend his nights in his own bed in Manhattan, a snowstorm kept him from landing in New Hampshire just as his rivals were ramping up their campaigns here. He cancelled Friday’s town hall and scheduled another for Monday.

This comes in addition to complaints that Trump refused additional infrastructure investments and had moved only one paid organizer into New Hampshire to supplement the team.

In lieu of any announcement of a major funding boost for its New Hampshire get-out-the-vote operation, Trump’s team has hustled this week to dispel the widespread assessment that its penny-pinching candidate was at a disadvantage here. It decided to invite reporters inside the New Hampshire campaign to watch volunteers work a phone bank in Manchester.

To prepare, Trump’s mid-Atlantic operation dashed off an email to supporters, offering free lodging and “potential opportunities to be near Mr. Trump” to volunteers who trekked up to New Hampshire. And Friday evening, in Trump’s Manchester headquarters, a couple dozen phone bankers made calls, asking what issues voters cared about — including whether “corrupt politicians” were a concern — as a POLITICO reporter looked in.

Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s campaign manager, said it was one of seven such call centers doing dialing across the state and that the Trump campaign had “over a dozen” paid staffers on the ground.

It was snowing but he said the weather wasn’t slowing the volunteers down. "The Trump people are actually out knocking on doors in a blizzard,” Lewandowski said.

A Trump campaign spokeswoman did not respond to questions about the total number of out-of-state volunteers who have come to Trump’s aid in New Hampshire. (Last week, Trump supporters in New York organized a single busload of volunteers. They returned home on Saturday night.)

Hillary Clinton, by contrast, has had more than 10,000 volunteers take part in her New Hampshire campaign, plus 50 paid staff members. And in Iowa, Cruz had set aside a bloc of housing for out-of-state volunteers two months ahead of the caucuses. Hundreds of volunteers, mostly from Texas, cycled through the housing in the run-up to the caucuses.

Meanwhile, Trump’s event-driven approach has hit a speedbump in New Hampshire, whose small size has made sustaining momentum through mega-rallies difficult. “It is tough because New Hampshire is small,” said one Trump insider. “Multiple large events would be too much.”

At a rally last week in Little Rock, Ralph Shoptaw, the general manager of the Arkansas state fair, announced that Trump had drawn a record crowd of 11,500 to the Barton Coliseum. But a reporter for the Daily Mail documented significant portions of the arena sitting empty and estimated attendance at 6,000. Shoptaw told the reporter that the 11,500 figure was provided by the campaign (Trump called it 12,000 in a tweet).

One person briefed on the behind-the-stage happenings at the event said that Trump had refused to go on stage until Shoptaw declared the crowd record-sized. Shoptaw did not respond to requests for comment from POLITICO.

Monday night’s primary-eve rally at the Verizon Center in Manchester has been unable to attract the interest needed to fill much of the 11,000-seat venue, and the rally proceeded with a configuration that used about half of the arena.

But Trump has continued to resist embracing the small-scale retail campaigning across all corners of the state that the most enthusiastic early-state voters crave.

At a rally on Sunday in Holderness, Trump gave the impression of a man dragged against his will to the sticks, repeatedly bemoaning the length of the roughly 60-mile drive from the Manchester area to the venue. “And now, I’ll take my hour-and-a-half drive back the other way,” said Trump at the rally’s conclusion. “I think I’ll miss the Super Bowl.”

But Trump may be coming around to the brutal realities of campaigning in a heated primary contest in which the dominant narrative is no longer his own dominance. By Sunday night, he appeared chastened. He tweeted, “So far the Super Bowl is very boring - not nearly as exciting as politics - MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”