Trump trades freewheeling campaign for sophisticated establishment operation

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ORLANDO — President Trump, as he ignited a bruising bid for reelection Tuesday, exchanged the freewheeling campaign that carried a populist party crasher to the White House in 2016 for the sophisticated trappings of the Republican establishment befitting the incumbent insider he has become.

Rather than begin his 2020 campaign with a nostalgic ride down the escalator at Trump Tower in New York, the president launched in the heart of central Florida, a critical battleground in a key swing state. The signature #MAGA rally at Amway Center wasn’t just for show, either; party officials fanned the grounds outside beforehand, collecting information to build Trump’s grassroots support here.

Rather than operate strictly according to the whim of the candidate, Team Trump this time around is a modern political machine, complete with the latest innovations in voter data and turnout.

Save for campaign manager Brad Parscale, the campaign is run by veteran GOP operatives and supported by a consolidated Republican Party and integrated network of grassroots affiliated groups — from Washington to the local precinct. Meanwhile, Trump family members and top campaign officials spent the day sequestered in a hotel suite dialing for dollars, looking to make a fundraising splash to accompany launch day.

“The most important thing is how unified the party is right now. We know who our candidate is, we all love and support President Trump,” Linda Trocine, chairman the Seminole County Republican Party in Florida, told the Washington Examiner as she waited in line for the rally. “It was a little chaotic, I suppose, last time. This time, we’re systematic, organized, working together, partnering, all these different groups. Everybody knows each other.”

Trocine was not exaggerating the transformation.

Trump emerged as the nominee with an incredibly loyal base. But the Republican establishment was suspicious of him, and he of them. The coalition of Republican voters Trump enjoyed on Election Day put him over the top, but not after much hand-wringing by some traditional, country club Republicans and other critical GOP blocs less enthused by the nationalist appeal that worked so well with blue-collar voters.

That friction sparked confusion and infighting in Republican circles, hamstringing Trump’s ability to maximize his potential, a luxury he might not have if the eventual Democratic nominee is not as disliked and distrusted as Hillary Clinton, who spent the first half of 2016 under the debilitating cloud of an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Top Republicans, aware of how precarious Trump’s victory was three years ago, are breathing a sigh of relief that the campaign he has assembled for 2020 is the fine-tuned machine the turbulent West Wing is not, claims to the contrary by the president notwithstanding.

“The Trump campaign has spent the off-season building the greatest fundraising, targeting, and grassroots operation in modern presidential history, but the general election won’t come into full view until there’s a Democratic nominee,” said Jason Miller, a Trump loyalist and his communications director on the 2016 campaign.

In his first campaign the president scored historic wins in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, states a GOP nominee had not won in decades. However, Trump won all three by just under 78,000 votes combined, and Clinton never stepped foot in Wisconsin and barely paid attention to Michigan. In Florida the president only won by 1.2 percentage points. Recent polling shows Trump in potential trouble in each of these crucial states.

Trump is publicly dismissive of the very real political vulnerability this suggests as he kicks off his re-election campaign, preferring to project an image of indomitable strength. His campaign is not.

The president’s operation, in concert with the Republican National Committee, has built a technically advanced data analytics program. It synthesizes polling, granular information on individual voters, and feedback on messages that are tested by the president and campaign officials like Parscale, who some Republicans describe as a “data savant.” The campaign hopes to make sound strategic decisions that complement Trump’s unorthodox personal style.

An extensive voter turnout operation, built by campaign political director Chris Carr, an RNC alumnus, boasts thousands of trained volunteers in the pipeline, ready to deploy to battlegrounds across the country, from expected competitive states such as Florida, to emerging purple states such as Arizona, to blue states Trump hopes to flip, such as Minnesota.

In a memo from Carr made available to the media, Team Trump said that approximately 12,000 supporters of the president were scheduled to attend more than 700 “MAGA meet-ups” across the country to watch the Orlando kickoff. Additionally, the memo claimed that 254 grassroots training seminars were set for this week in nearly every state in the country, with more than 4,400 volunteers set to attend.

“All of these little pockets of grassroots efforts, we’re all starting to combine as one huge effort now,” said Margaret McDeed, 56, the who chairs the Hillsborough County (Tampa) chapter of Women for Trump. “We all have a common goal.”

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