Trump’s Rocky Colorado Operation

Colorado was unfriendly terrain for the Donald Trump campaign during the mercurial delegate-selection process in the primary season, and it is home to leaders of a movement to deny him the GOP nomination at this month’s convention.

But a visit to the Centennial State last week and the hiring of a state director offer evidence that the presumptive GOP nominee is stepping up his efforts in the key swing state. Patrick Davis, who took over as the campaign’s state director on Wednesday, said Colorado is among a handful of states that could go either way in November.

“It’s on every map. The road to the White House goes through Colorado.”

“I have not seen an Electoral College map that doesn’t include Colorado,” he said. “It’s on every map. The road to the White House goes through Colorado.”

Independent analysts and even some Trump supporters give the campaign low marks so far in organizing a first-rate campaign.

“My impression at this point is that the Trump campaign is well behind the Clinton campaign in organizing the state — he only hired his state director last week,” Colorado State University political science professor Robert Duffy wrote in an email to LifeZette. “In contrast, she has more personnel on the ground, and they have been here for months.”

What’s more, Duffy wrote, the state Republican Party has been hampered by infighting in recent years. The results have been evident on TV screens throughout the state, according to Duffy.

“She has been running ads on TV and he has not,” he wrote. “Thus far he has not done the things one would expect of a serious candidate for president — but then again, news reports suggest he has not done any of that in other states either.”

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One local Colorado activist, who called into “The Laura Ingraham Show” on Tuesday to describe the presence of the Trump campaign at the recent Western Conservative Summit, was not impressed by the hiring of Davis.

“I’ve been calling the campaign for months trying to get something going out in Colorado and then finally we have somebody who’s going to run the Trump campaign the weekend of the Western Conservative Summit, and there was nothing,” the caller, who identified himself as ‘Daniel the Plumber,’ told LifeZette Editor-in-Chief Laura Ingraham. “No sign up sheet, no nothing. [Davis] was there for an hour, he was too cool for everyone who wanted to have boots on the ground and fight for our country … This guy has done nothing. If this was ‘The Apprentice’ he would have been fired already.”

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Former Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo, a Trump supporter, expressed his own concerns in an interview with the Colorado Springs Gazette.

“I look at things in a more traditional way about how to win elections,” he said. “Of course, my last two didn’t go that well, so nobody should really pay attention to what I think about it.”

The assessment of the Trump campaign in Colorado mirrors grumbling among Republicans in other key states who say Trump lacks staff, offices, and other trappings of a modern presidential campaign. He ended May with an enormous fundraising disadvantage compared to Clinton.

“Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush still have better organization here than Donald Trump,” one Colorado Republican strategist quipped to Politico.

Davis, a veteran Colorado political consultant, acknowledged Trump has work to do. But he said the campaign is coordinating with the state GOP to identify supporters.

“We’ve seen over 100 staff come in and out of the state in the last year,” he said.

Davis said Colorado’s decision not to hold a primary or caucus — which Trump characterized as an anti-democratic attempt to “rig” the delegate-selection process — delayed the campaign from taking steps to recruit county leaders and campaign volunteers. But he said he has been getting dozens of calls every day over the last week from people offering to help.

President Obama won Colorado twice, taking 51.5 percent of the vote in his re-election bid in 2012. Those two elections followed narrow wins by Republican nominees in 1996, 2000, and 2004. There has been little public polling. Presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton led Trump by a single percentage point in a CBS News/YouGov survey last month.

Some analysts have suggested that Colorado, with its growing Hispanic population, is a poor fit for the New York billionaire’s hard-line immigration message — and that he would be better off concentrating on Rust Belt states with large populations of working-class whites. But Duffy wrote that the state should be close and that “if Trump wants to be president, he needs to pay attention to the state pretty soon if he wants to win it in November.”

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Davis rejected the notion that Trump is a nonstarter with Hispanic voters.

“Donald Trump is going to do well in Colorado with voters of all types … The one common denominator is that they are looking for hope,” he said. “Donald Trump is the only candidate who can give them hope.”

Unlike some states, where senators and Senate hopefuls have run away from Trump, Colorado’s Republican Senate nominee endorsed Trump during an appearance last week.

“While I might not agree with everything Donald Trump says, I proudly stand with Donald Trump,” Darryl Glenn told the crowd at the Western Conservative Summit in Denver.

Said Davis: “Darryl really does understand Colorado. We’re happy to be running with Darryl.”

But Davis said he takes nothing for granted.

“I’m never, ever where I want to be,” he said. “If I feel like I’m comfortable, I’m probably missing something.”