GOP Frontrunner Trump Shores Up Michigan Campaign

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LANSING, MI – With 80 days remaining before the March 8 primary, Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump, who is making a campaign appearance Monday in Grand Rapids, is shoring up his Michigan campaign.

Powerful GOP political operative Scott Hagerstrom, a former state director of the conservative Americans for Prosperity, will head the billionaire real estate tycoon’s Michigan campaign.

Hagerstrom, who also worked on the campaign that defeated the Proposal 1 sales tax in May, “will be a great asset to our team as we continue to build infrastructure beyond the early primary states and share my vision to make America great again,” Trump said in a statement sent Sunday to The Detroit News.

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“(Trump) is a proven success with the leadership capabilities to accomplish what those in Washington, DC, cannot,” Hagerstrom said in the statement to The Detroit News. “I believe in his message, his vision and his ability to make our country better than ever before.”

Trump’s appearance at the DeltaPlex Arena is his second campaign visit to Michigan this year.

The firebrand candidate is leading in polls in early-voting states. A new FOX News poll showed he jumped to 39 percent among Republicans in early voting states — an 11 percent jump — after he made comments about stopping non-U.S. Muslims from entering the country. The poll showed seven in 10 GOP voters favor a temporary ban.

The latest poll averages from RealClearPolitics.com show Trump polling at 34 percent among likely Republican voters. The next closest contender is Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, with 17 percent.

Trump’s support may be higher than polls suggest, according to an analysis by Morning Consult, a polling and market research firm, which found that Trump generally does better in online polls than in surveys conducted by phone.

Telephone surveys show he is backed by one-third or fewer of GOP voters, while online surveys show he has the support of nearly four in 10 GOP voters, according to that analysis.

Morning Consult’s polling director, Kyle Dropp, said “voters are about more likely to support Trump when they’re taking a poll online than when they’re talking to a live interviewer,” according to a report in the Los Angeles Times.

Trump also organized campaigns in other early voting states, including Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

Other states with organized campaign efforts include Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.

Michigan is not listed among the states with on-the-ground staff. GOP rivals Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Cruz, John Kasich and Rand Paul have built campaign infrastructure in Michigan.

“I don’t know how you run a campaign statewide without having some organizational structure in place,” Paul Welday, a Republican political consultant from Oakland County, told The Detroit News. “These things just don’t happen by themselves. Eighty days is not a long time to build an infrastructure in a state the size of Michigan. He’s got his work cut out for him.”

However, Greg McNeilly, a Republican consultant from Grand Rapids, said that Trump gets so much airtime because of his controversial statements about Muslims, Mexican immigrants and his rivals for the GOP nomination that he may be able to get away with running a non-traditional campaign.

“He’s not keeping the hours of a normal candidate,” McNeilly told The Detroit News.

Whether Trump’s media-driven campaign translates to voters who turn out for Michigan’s March 8 primary is yet to be seen, John Truscott, a Lansing-based Republican political consultant, told The Detroit News.

“Trump has generated a tremendous amount of interest, but do those people actually show up and vote in primaries?” he asked.

» Photo by Gage Skidmore via Flickr