Donald Trump is finally using data to organize his Presidential campaign—but it’s not for grassroots organization or voter identification. It’s to build a list of Republicans threatening a “Dump Trump” revolt at the RNC.
According to POLITICO, Trump and his campaign chairman Paul Manafort are hard at work marshaling experienced convention operatives to head off any effort to oust Trump from the Republican ballot.
Every effort to organize against Trump’s nomination has ultimately failed, and time is running out to organize before the mid-July even. But Trump and Manafort are reportedly taking the job very seriously.
They have 150 volunteers and eight paid staffers operating as “delegate whips,” to keep the delegates in line with the aide of a massive delegate dossier database that has plenty of information on all the RNC’s attendees. And they plan to use the database to its fullest: They will “spend the next few weeks” calling or emailing “nearly all of them.”
It turns out, when Trump ally Roger Stone threatened to send representatives to delegates’ hotel rooms to “convince” them to vote for Trump, he wasn’t far off the actual plan.
It doesn’t seem like Manafort and team are going to send flowers and chocolates to the Dump Trump folks to win them over, but we don’t know what their message is going to be. No one should be surprised that Manafort can get hostile—he was, after all, hired as an attack dog to head off Team Cruz—but it is surprising to see Trump actually using data to drive campaign strategy.
He famously told reporters in May that he hated data and had no plans to use it. The RNC was notably disappointed, since the committee relies on voter data, often gleaned through regular campaign activities like phone-banking and door knocking, to build their donor lists and drive membership.
Plans changed, apparently, when Trump’s self interest came into play.
Delegates, of course, will now have to prepare to come face-to-face with Trump’s preservation operation. That will leave them with very serious choices, especially if Trump continues to poll in the mid 30’s: risk Trump’s wrath by changing their vote (and maybe risk the strength of their hotel door locks) or go along with the ride.