Publicly, Republican Party officials continue to stand by Donald Trump. Privately, at the highest levels, party leaders have started talking about cutting off support to Trump in October and redirecting cash to saving endangered congressional majorities.
Since the Cleveland convention, top party officials have been quietly making the case to political journalists, donors and GOP operatives that the Republican National Committee has done more to help Trump than it did to support its 2012 nominee Mitt Romney and that, therefore, Trump has only himself and his campaign to blame for his precipitous slide in the polls, according to people who have spoken with Republican leadership.
Sean Spicer, the RNC’s top strategist, on Wednesday made that case to 14 political reporters he convened at the organization’s Capitol Hill headquarters for an off-the-record conversation about the election.
Reporters from POLITICO and BuzzFeed were not invited.
According to several people who attended, Spicer spent much of the session detailing all the RNC resources that have been deployed to swing states and how the party’s infrastructure is stronger than it has ever been.
In the words of one person in the room, the message was that the RNC has “all these staffers out there working and knocking on doors, with a data system they believe rivals what Obama build in 2012—so it’s not their fault.”
Spicer emphasized that RNC chairman Reince Priebus has been working aggressively to coach Trump into being a more disciplined candidate, calling the nominee “five or six times a day,” according to another person present at last week’s closed-door meeting.
According to sources close to Priebus, the chairman has warned that if Trump does not better heed this persistent advice to avoid dust-ups driven by his rhetoric, the RNC might not be able to help him as much – suggesting the money and ground resources might be diverted.
To this point, Spicer has suggested a mid-October deadline for turning the presidential campaign around, suggesting last week to reporters and in separate discussions with GOP operatives that it would cause serious concern inside the RNC if Trump were to remain in a weakened position by then.
Operatives close to the RNC leadership, who have heard this argument from party leadership, say the committee might have to make a decision about pulling the plug on Trump before that.
“Early voting in Ohio starts in a few weeks, there’s a 45-day window for absentee voters, so mid-September would probably be the latest the RNC could redeploy assets and have any real impact,” said an RNC member privately: “The only thing you could change in mid-October would be to shift some TV ads, maybe try to prop up Senate candidates in tough races like [Rob] Portman, [Marco] Rubio and [Pat] Toomey.”
One high-level Republican strategist added: “The party committee has this same job every cycle, to employ limited resources to maximum effect at the ballot box … And that means not pouring precious resources into dysfunctional, non-cooperative losing campaigns.”
Spicer, asked Saturday night about the ongoing discussions, told POLITICO Trump could not be cut off soon because the party needs him to raise more money. "When I've gotten these questions, I've been correcting the record. There is no talk of shifting resources in mid-August and it's unlikely that would happen until late September or October."
He also said the RNC did not view the current polling deficit suffered by Trump to be impossible to overcome.
But on Thursday, POLITICO revealed that more than 70 Republicans had signed a letter to Priebus, urging him to immediately cut off spending on Trump and to instead shift cash to saving the party’s congressional majorities.
Within the Trump campaign, there has been suspicion for months that the RNC already has not been as supportive of its nominee as it could — and should — be, according to operatives in and around the campaign.
“There's lingering doubt,” said one operative who has worked with the campaign. “It's never really improved much, and never for long.” The operative dismissed efforts to withhold RNC support from Trump as “only coming from the usual suspects — the same crap from the same Republicans who can't win elections.”
One Trump staffer dismissed the possibility that the RNC might cut off funding to Trump, while downplaying talk of tension between the entities. The staffer said he communicates with his party counterparts “multiple times a day and the interactions are 100 percent good.”
Other Trump allies in and around the campaign fear that the RNC could use Democrat Hillary Clinton’s widening lead in polls to justify pulling the plug on Trump before he has a chance to even the race.
RNC fundraisers have in fact been signaling to major donors a way that they could write huge checks to Trump’s joint fundraising committee with the RNC and dictate that only a fraction — if any — of the cash would go to Trump.
Spicer has said RNC fundraisers are not communicating this sentiment.
But one fundraiser with knowledge of the party’s high-dollar fundraising efforts said earlier this summer that the message to leery donors was “people can give to the RNC and not to him.”
Through the end of June — the period covered by the most recent Federal Election Commission filings — the main Trump-RNC joint fundraising committee had transferred only $2.2 million to Trump’s campaign, as compared to $10.1 million to the RNC.
To be sure, the committee, Trump Victory, still had $12.1 million in the bank at that point. And his campaign announced that it had combined with the joint committee to raise $80 million in July, though it’s unclear how much of that was transferred to his campaign versus the party.
Trump himself declared Thursday that he’s doing more to boost the RNC’s coffers than the campaign is doing for him, and warned that he might back out of the joint fundraising arrangement.
By Friday, though, Trump was praising Priebus for doing “such a great job. We’re friends. We work together. We work with a lot of other people and I have to say we have great unification. Now, every once in a while, you read about somebody that wants to be a rebel, they get a little free publicly for themselves.”
Priebus, Spicer and other RNC brass also projected a united front, with Priebus rejecting reports of discord by showing up at a Friday Trump rally in Erie, Pa. “Don’t believe the garbage you read,” Priebus said. “Let me tell you something: Donald Trump, the Republican Party, all of you, we’re gonna put him in the White House and save this country together.”
But the RNC’s frustration is at a boiling point after a week of deepening division between the organization’s political and communications staffs and their counterparts on the Trump campaign.
Beyond the candidate’s continued rhetorical carelessness on the stump, his campaign has confounded GOP officials with a travel schedule—more events have been announced in Colorado and Virginia, two swing states that appear to be out of reach, and even deep blue Connecticut—that many believe is a poor use of the candidate’s time.
“He has shown no interest in doing the tough demographic work that's necessary in campaigns,” one RNC member said. “You don't see them trying to talk to independent women, educated Hispanics; and beyond that, it's an issue of strategic staffing. I don't think he understands how presidential campaigns are won.”
“The senior staff gets it,” that RNC member said, “but the true believers outnumber them.”
After four years spent working toward winning back the White House, the RNC’s shift toward an endgame it didn’t envision—essentially deciding when to concede the White House to focus on saving the Senate and saving face—is a sign of resignation setting in.
On Wednesday evening as reporters were filing into the RNC’s conference room, Spicer, Chris Carr and Lindsey Walters were ready to begin the briefing but the attendees were focused on the flat screen TVs on the walls, which were tuned to CNN’s live coverage of an unknown individual, later determined to be a Trump supporter from Virginia, climbing up the glass exterior of Trump Tower with suction cups.
Even in the belly of the RNC, there was no escaping the near constant distractions of Trump.
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