Donald Trump’s previous presidential runs were known for chaos and infighting. His 2024 campaign is being run more like a Fortune 500 company.
Trump the candidate remains a freewheeling frontman, attacking other candidates in off-the-cuff rants and lashing out at judges and prosecutors in court.
Yet the machine built to return him to the White House has learned from past missteps and missed opportunities, and is seizing every advantage while pressing allies to fall in line. If 2016 was Trump’s breakout moment, and 2020 offered the advantages of incumbency, 2024 marks the rise of a professionalized Trump campaign.
In Iowa, where Trump won by a historic margin, and New Hampshire, where he bested his last remaining rival, Nikki Haley, by 11 percentage points, local political operatives have seen a difference.
“I give a lot of credit to just the mechanics of how they’re running the campaign,” said Chris Ager, chairman of the Republican Party of New Hampshire. “It seems like it’s extremely well-run and professional — much more so than the Wild West phase in 2016.”
The Trump campaign worked for months to secure big early wins and drive rivals from the race quickly. It pressed to make more primaries winner-take-all, to help Trump rapidly amass the delegates needed to lock up the nomination. And it scooped up endorsements, dispatched popular surrogates to early battlegrounds, and organized volunteers and supporters to get out the vote.
“The results certainly speak to the fact that the Trump campaign effectively identified and turned out their supporters in Iowa,” said Nicole Schlinger, a Republican operative who worked on Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s 2016 win in the state. “There were no anecdotal reports of caucus cards being left on the chairs at rallies like we heard about in 2016.”
A disciplined campaign that has delivered early results and kept its staff focused and in harmony gives Trump room to be…
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