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Trump's Campaign? What Campaign?

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

Donald Trump's firing of his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, sounds like a big deal, until you realize how little of a Trump campaign there is to manage.

Late Monday, hours after presumptive Republican presidential nominee Trump let his campaign manager go, new campaign filings revealed that Trump ended May with less than $1.3 million in the bank.

That might sound like a nice piece of change until you learn that Hillary Clinton, his presumptive Democratic opponent, raised more than $28 million in May and started June with $42 million in cash.

Even Trump's fellow Republican Ben Carson reported $1.8 million -- $500,000 more than Trump -- in his campaign fund in May, even though he stopped campaigning in March.

Overall, Team Trump -- his presidential campaign, the Republican National Committee and Trump's allied super PAC Great America PAC -- went into June with $21.7 million in cash. That compares to $103.4 million in cash on hand held by Team Clinton, which includes her campaign, the Democratic National Committee and the Priorities USA super PAC.

With that, the Clinton campaign spent $1.6 million in ad production and airtime, pummeling Trump with attack ads in battleground states. That compares to only $150,000 spent by Trump's campaign on ads in May. He has preferred to attack "Crooked Hillary" in speeches, on Twitter and through other free-media-generating stunts.

 

Personnel? At last count, the Trump campaign had about 30 staffers nationwide, according to Associated Press, while Clinton's team has more than 700 nationwide, including 50 people in the critical swing state of Ohio alone.

You could tell that Trump was in trouble when he stopped bragging about his polls, which have generated a drumbeat of bad news for his campaign since Clinton clinched enough delegates in early June to win her party's nomination. On the morning after Lewandowski's firing, Real Clear Politics' daily average of major polls showed Clinton ahead of Trump by 45 percent to 39.2 percent.

That's a big slide for Trump since mid-May, when polls showed the two in more of a dead heat and, in some cases, the New York developer slightly ahead.

But the polls give Hillary little reason to rest comfortably. She and Trump have the highest disapproval ratings -- more than 50 percent for both -- of any two presumptive major party nominees in the history of polling.

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(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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