[quote=“Tempo Gain”]Looks like cash is a problem
tinyurl.com/gw7scbp[/quote]
The way he’s managing his campaign - or not managing it, as it were - is fascinating and apparently unprecedented. From Slate’s Jamelle Bouie, emphasis added:
[quote]If you follow enough election coverage, you’ll notice a phrase from those inclined to read and absorb political science: “Campaigns don’t matter.” The idea is that the twists and turns of the horse race are less important than the broad “fundamentals” of an election year: unemployment, economic growth, foreign conflict, etc. What’s key is the mechanism behind the slogan. It’s not that campaigns are useless; it’s that—in general—they’re evenly matched, so they cancel each other out. When they aren’t—Obama’s ground game vs. Romney’s, for instance—they don’t.
What happens when one side has a campaign and the other doesn’t? When one side is mobilizing voters, contacting supporters, and persuading independents, and the other is sitting on its hands? Cable news has done a lot for Donald Trump, but it can’t raise money or organize volunteers. What happens when it’s September and Trump lacks the personnel or the cash to mount a credible fight against the Democratic Party?
I don’t know. No one knows, because it’s never happened before. But if the polls are any indication, what happens is something like a catastrophic defeat for Trump and the rest of the Republican Party. And of all possible outcomes in this election, that’s the most fitting. Trump built his career by talking and grifting his way into some facsimile of success, before losing it to his own arrogance and narcissism. If nothing else, a historic defeat in November will fit the pattern.[/quote]
I guess it’s possible that he mobilizes the vote through Fox or rallies or whatever, but what he’s (not) doing is totally new.
And from James Fallows at the Atlantic, via a few other sources, a chart and a bit of an article comparing June presidential spending by party in 2012 and 2016. Part of me thinks, “Great, campaign ads are dumb anyway!” But mostly it looks like piss-poor management on the part of the reds:
[quote]Doing a good job as a candidate means, among other things, being aware of the huge financial obligations of today’s politicking: How you raise money, how you carefully husband it, how you spend it when and where it is most useful and save it everywhere else.
The chart above, from Mark Murray of NBC, is one indicator of how things are going. Four years ago, an incumbent president and his well-funded challenger were in a tight advertising race in what both sides had identified as possible swing states.
This year, all the ad-spending in those swing states has been by Hillary Clinton and her allies. Trump’s forces have not put up anything. Either he doesn’t have enough money, or he hasn’t understood how and when and where to spend it, or he has no ads prepared, or something else. He has also apparently ignored the professional-politicians’ lesson of the past few cycles, which is that opposition advertising in May and June, when a nominee has emerged but before he or she has been officially chosen at the convention, can powerfully brand a candidate in a way very hard to shake once the “real” campaigning begins in the fall.
To get all the provisos out of the way: Of course skill in running a campaign is not the same as skill at being president. Of course money is the ruination of modern politics. Of course ads can be an insult to the collective intelligence. Of course [name a hundred other points]. But you can’t be a good president if you don’t get elected. And in this, the first sample of how Trump might handle the complex management challenges that go with political leadership, early results look bad for him. He said: Don’t sweat all the details, I’ll do a great job. In fact he’s doing a terrible job.[/quote]
