We (FReepers, Conservatives, libertarians, ant-establishment types) take the short range view.
I was at the Newnan(Coweta) Cruz rally after Red State where Erikson dumped Trump. There were over 2,000 there at one time with people coming and going it was probably 3 or 4,000 total. And 99% were clearly Cruz fans.
The Cruz campaign staff was clearly JV. They had Cruz standing in the hot sun to speak when he clearly should have been in the shade of the tall trees.
But most importantly, the Cruz staff did not have voter walk-lists handy, nor palmcards to give to volunteers. The biggest mistake of any campaign is to have dedicated volunteers show up and give them nothing to do.
Cruz Staff repeated that when Rafael Cruz spoke to Hispanic Patriots. My daughter got 200 to show up. There were many paid Cruz staff there. But they gave us nothing to do.
The candidate cannot do it alone. Only us volunteers talking with our neighbors can bypass the media that Cruz does not have.
And in this case, Crane also did not have the media, certainly not the Atlanta media, nor the local newspapers I read online.
People who signed up with the Cruz campaign at our Columbus get together were provided follow up contacts and call lists spat out by a smartphone app automated the phone calling. Those of us who were on the Crane campaign also had walk lists generated by the same app, and we had about four Crane volunteers (opposite end of the district, and only part of Columbus is included) going door-to-door on Saturday mornings. We also had sign holding at a busy part of Veteran’s Parkway on Saturday mornings, afternoons, and rush hours on selected weekdays for both Cruz and Crane. Of course our ground game could have been better, but it was more visible than Trump’s, Rubio’s or Carson’s.