Recent reporting on the financial and organisational state of the Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton campaigns show a historically unprecedented divide in resources and planning that could very well lead to a landslide election.
Hillary Clinton boasts 823 paid staff around the country, $42 million cash on hand, and between her campaign, the Democratic party, and her affiliated Super PACs, raised over $70 million in the month of May.
Trump, by comparison, has just 20 paid staff, $1.3 million cash on hand, and raised a total of $4 million last month.
And this matters. Trump’s tightwad approach has survived so far by dominating news media and drowning out his opponents. That may have worked for the primary, where voters largely agreed on the issues and Trump won by having the loudest voice, but the General Election is a completely different box of frogs.
Both candidates are shackled with historically high unfavourable ratings, and these are extremely hard to change. But at least Clinton has the ability to do something about it. Her campaign has spent $22 million in the last few weeks plastering swing states with ads focusing specifically on her personal history, with a specific focus on the Children’s Health Insurance Programme, her defining achievement as First Lady, which insures around eight million kids living in poverty.
Trump has yet to respond in any way, having spent $0 on ads so far, and as of yet making no moves to reserve ad space for the future. While he continues to get plenty of media exposure, it’s just not the same thing. You can control the messaging of your own campaign, you can’t control the media. As a result, Trump’s slight lead in the polls has fallen to a near double digit deficit in just one month.
Election campaigns can be boiled down to a simple game of attempting to win a series of news cycles. So far, Trump has shown himself to lack the media discipline required to stay on top, committing numerous unforced errors. Last week, Hillary was interviewed by the FBI and Bill Clinton made a major fumble by meeting with the Attorney-General, which some saw as evidence of collusion. That should have been a bad cycle for Hillary. The right move for Trump would be to stay out of it, or maybe lightly pile on. Instead, he got himself in a whole bunch of trouble by retweeting an image from 4chan which depicted Hillary Clinton with a pile of cash and what appeared to be a Star of David, which some interpreted as anti-semitic. That in itself was not yet a story, but then he deleted the tweet, and put out multiple statements attempting to defend himself by claiming it was a ‘Sheriff star’. It then became a story with legs, and started to overshadow the Clinton scandal.
That’s the kind of media relations incompetence you get when your opponent has an entire department dedicated to communications and your staff is literally one 26-year-old girl and a twitter account.
It’s even reached the point where the campaign has shown such incompetence that even would-be rivals are annoyed. Obama 2008 campaign manager David Plouffe was quoted saying “He’s not doing basic things. It’s not that complicated. It’s so offensive as a practitioner”. Of course, Hillary Clinton probably doesn’t mind.