Trump: Can He Run a Campaign With Rallies and Interviews?

Donald Trump is running his own campaign. It is mostly made up of rallies, interviews (many from his office in Trump Towers) and tweets. He self-funded the primaries, but he stopped, and his campaign is now scrambling for funding.  At least a billion dollars will be spent by Hillary Clinton and her supporters. She already has started in Colorado with TV ads. Her campaign has built a ground game since late last year and a Super Pac has invested nearly $10 million in anti-Trump ads running through November.

Trump’s strategy worked in the primaries where a smaller, more attentive, and in his case, passionate electorate was involved. Approximately 50 million people took part in the primaries and caucuses. Clinton received 16 million and Trump 13 million. But, the 2016 general election will have more than 130,000,000 voters, nearly three times the primary turnout. Many are occasional and less attentive voters. Communicating and motivating them has historically required frequent and repeated advertising, mostly on television, but increasingly on the internet, and a strong targeted ground game to identify and attract less motivated potential supporters. It is not a national campaign. The entire effort is aimed at a dozen states of which Colorado is one.

Trump is already down about 6 points and the conventions are a month away. His approach is either brilliant or a disaster, unfortunately for the Republican Party, they share the risk and may reap the disaster.

See CPR: Deluge of political ads coming to a TV screen near you; $39M spent so far