TJ Walker breaks down Trump's 2016 campaign shake-up: Paul Manafort out, Steve Bannon in from Breitbart, Kellyanne Conway as new campaign manager. The problem is converting niche media tactics that work for core audiences into a strategy that wins a general election.
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Folks are about to head into the fall campaign. It's really the final leg of a many year process for presidential candidates. Donald Trump is way, way back in the polls. It was announced yesterday that he is shaken up his campaign team, essentially demoting Paul Manafort, the campaign chairman, and bringing in a guy whose current job is running Breitbart News, a far right win website. Now, I think it goes beyond debate and beyond controversy, regardless of your politics, to notice that Donald Trump has received more negative news coverage than any presidential candidate of a mainstream party ever. Certainly in the last month it has been unrelentingly negative. He's been criticized by conservatives, by Republicans, conservative media, mainstream media, and obviously liberal and left leaning media. The criticism has been absolutely non stop. How do you stop that? How do you change it? Well, Donald Trump is suggesting that he would like to change. He is bringing in a new campaign manager, Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, and the well known pollster, and he is bringing in other people. But what sort of a message does it say to bring in now as his top advisor, the guy from Breitbart News, someone who's never run a political campaign. And his business model consists of saying things that are considered beyond the pale to anyone who is not a part of the far right? Now, Steve Bannon apparently is a successful business person. Breitbart News is getting bigger audience than ever before, making more money from clicks and advertising. But at some point, people have to step back and look at the fundamental difference between a media company and a political candidate. So for example, if you're rush Limbaugh and 95% of the country doesn't like you or doesn't believe in you or share your values, but you can get 5% of the country to listen to you every single week or in any given day. He has about 20 million people listening to him in a week, then you're the most wildly successful talk show host ever. Even if 95% or 93% of people never, ever listen to you. Politics isn't like that. You have to get 50% of the vote plus one. You have to at least get a majority of the electoral college. Yes, there could be third and fourth party candidates in there. So you won't technically have to get 50%, but for the most part, you have to get a majority of the votes among the two major party candidates or you're just not going to win. So to reach out to someone whose sole business model is figuring out how do you excite and exercise a 5% extremist group here and write off 95%, I think, is quite telling that essentially the candidate has almost given up or just doesn't even buy into the premise of wanting to win more votes than his main opponent, in this case Hillary Clinton. Now, you see this in many situations in different industries, not politics. When someone has succeeded doing one thing or some organization succeeded doing one thing, very hard to switch to do something else. Microsoft, really, really good at creating operating systems, never very good at creating MP3 players and other devices, not really good at mastering the whole Internet thing. You're creating search engines. Google, as innovative as they are, they're really good at selling ads for keyword search. But whether it's RSS feeders or a gazillion other things, they fail. Donald Trump is really, really good at saying wildly inflammatory things that gets a tremendous amount of media attention. The fact that traditionally half the people might, or more than half might think he's a complete idiot for saying it has never bothered him. Because in a primary environment running for the Republican nomination, that didn't hurt. That helped. But now times are different, times are new, and the strategy that helped him succeed in one area isn't helping him in another. You see this time and time again with industries the best buggy makers were not the ones that made the best horses. Barnes and Noble, which did such a great job of selling books, was not as good as Amazon. Once things changed, once the environment changed. Donald Trump is certainly giving the indication that he's not understanding how the environment has changed. Therefore, he's not going to change his messages, his messaging process, his whole communication process. I'm TJ Walker. What do you think? Post your comments here or send me an email or communicate on Twitter. J. Walker.
