I think Trump is just keeping his powder dry. Whatever Hillary has spent over say the last 3 months on ads, it’s pretty much all gone down the crapper, as her email and other controversies congeal and solidify. In absolute contrast and polar opposite, if now Trump is going to get and stick and repeat on T_Prompter message AND NOW get some ads going, who is going to tell me that this is going to be ineffective? You mean, in an electorate oriented towards the 11-second attention span, ads they saw 2 months ago are going to have traction? I doubt it.
On the HRC side, what are these ads going to say? That she’s for the working man and woman and the children. Bleh. Been said so many times it’s drivel. Meanwhile, this lying thing of hers is absolutely penetrating the consciousness of the electorate. Even with the Dems saying “well, where’s the prosecution? if she’s so guilty?”
Uh huh. Into the minds of women everywhere is the fact that she has lied her fairly wide ass off to them and betrayed more and more people along the way. Hillary is losing women, and large swaths of them, with this lying. And this going to be drawn into sharper and sharper focus as time goes on.
Some may say (wrt Trump) that this (a: failure to place and show ads, and 2: failure to develop ground game) is amateurishness on the part of Trump. I’ll admit to thinking along those lines. “Those lines” are the established practice of every one of the political campaigns that have gone on for years and years. Let’s at minimum acknowledge that *IF* this is a tactic, then it gets and has very successfully gotten the media all on one side of the boat, and they lose credibility when they report exactly the same story in tandem. Which they do.
It is not necessarily better that Trump is different, but he is. And making the comparison to “conventional wisdom” is not that germane, IMO.
This is a man who has a keen sense of the power of the media, for better or for worse.
I remain a bit concerned about the so-called “ground game” but I am not concerned about him keeping dry powder for the late innings of the campaign. Maybe it was a gargantuan and fortuitous accident and he only stumbled into where he is. Maybe not.
Re: the ground game perceived lack- I quit second guessing Trump back in the spring. Now I don’t cringe when he says or does something that once would have appeared off or silly. He has shown time after time that his sense of what works and what it is time for is probably better than anyone else’s in the public field.