How Donald Trump rewired the 2016 campaign

By Elis Stokols

In three short months, the real estate mogul has altered nearly every aspect of the GOP presidential race and left rivals like Jeb Bush scrambling to respond.

This is not the race Jeb Bush expected to run. The plan was to craft a policy-focused campaign, with scores of policy aides hired to help him articulate meaty ideas on the trail and distinguish himself as a policy-oriented candidate. He expected to run “joyfully” and with a message of optimism.
So much for that.

As summer turns to fall, the former Florida governor has been forced to retool his campaign, incorporating a growing list of attack lines against Donald Trump into his stump speech and, according to those close to the campaign, studiously preparing for a second debate that will likely shape up as a clash between him and the real estate mogul. While Bush still talks about campaigning “with joy” in his heart, with his campaign now shuffling its budget, those involved say it’s likely that some resources from other parts of the campaign will be redirected to looking into Trump’s record.
It’s yet another measure of how Trump has rewired the race in the three short months since he announced his campaign. It’s hard to overstate his effect, or even to find a historical analogue – with his outsized personality and outsider message, Trump has sent his GOP rivals careening in directions they couldn’t have imagined, forced them to rethink their strategies and tactics, and altered expectations about the duration of the primary season. He’s even managed to unsettle the politically active billionaires who are currently sizing up the contest.
Trump’s anti-establishment candidacy isn’t the sole reason why the GOP field has been reordered since he joined the race, but he’s the proximate cause.
"There is a fairly delusional bubble from Washington, D.C., powered by the wishful thinking among the party establishment that this will all magically dissipate,” said Steve Schmidt, a GOP strategist who guided John McCain’s 2008 campaign. “This is a movement. The leader is a master showman and master communicator who is in complete and absolute command of every facet of the political battlefield.”
Where his rivals once expected him to flame out before the first vote was cast next year, the consensus among the nearly two dozen campaign staffers and GOP operatives interviewed for this story is that he’ll be a force long past the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 1. The old theory of the case – that the nomination would ultimately narrow down to Bush and one other candidate – is out the window.
"It was going to be Jeb and someone else; now a lot of people think it'll be Trump and someone else, maybe two others," a strategist for one Republican campaign said.
Yet Bush isn’t the only rival whose fortunes have notably changed in just a few months. When the summer began, Scott Walker looked like a safe bet to win the Iowa caucuses next year. Now, an overly scripted style and inconsistencies on key issues have led him to plummet to fourth in the polls there and raised questions about his staying power. Rand Paul, seen just a year ago as the most viable anti-establishment Republican in the field, is now an afterthought, relegated to a smaller map where his libertarian stylings might still have appeal.
One candidate, in particular, has thrived: Ben Carson, the retired pediatric neurosurgeon once thought to be the longest of long-shots. An outsider like Trump, Carson has surged into second place in national polls in part by riding in Trump’s slipstream, finding success by picking up Christian conservatives who are angry at the GOP establishment but turned off by Trump’s bombast and ostentatious style.
While Walker and Paul’s woes can’t be directly traced to Trump’s entry into the race, the environment he’s helped create makes it that much harder for faltering candidates to break through and regain their footing – the billionaire is chewing through news cycles, and leaves limited oxygen for anyone else.
“There is a dynamic of these typical politicians, they’re just not interesting,” said Craig Robinson, a prominent GOP activist in Iowa and the editor-in-chief of The Iowa Republican. “With Trump, everything he does is interesting. I don’t know what Jeb Bush would do that’s interesting to me. What they’ve done all summer just hasn’t worked.”
The Trump effect has stretched well beyond the candidates themselves. Trump has blown a hole in the best-laid plans of Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, who went to great lengths to create a tidier and shorter 2016 nomination process – now there are real conversations about the possibility of a brokered convention next summer. The committee is even girding for the possibility of a drawn-out fight that could go all the way to the convention, a senior party official said. While Priebus publicly states that he’s confident the process will “sort itself out,” the committee, the official said, is nervous.
There’s good cause for worry: the Trump portfolio has occupied a healthy portion of Priebus’ time since his entry into the race. Early on, the chairman reached out privately to Trump about the tone of his rhetoric, only to have Trump turn the tables on him by publicly offering a different characterization of the call. More recently, in response to fears Trump might run as a third-party candidate if he failed to win the nomination, the RNC chairman was forced to circulate a loyalty pledge to candidates asking them to promise to support the party nominee.
“You just throw out the playbook and say ‘holy shit.’ It's just amazing,” said Renee Plummer, a GOP activist in Portsmouth, N.H., who has hosted nearly all of the 17 declared Republican candidates at her frequent business roundtables.
Equally astounding is that Trump has managed to confound the class of uncommitted mega-donors who suddenly find themselves skittish about jumping into a contest with so much uncertainty.
“You always have one set of donors who wait it out,” said Charlie Black, a long-time GOP lobbyist who has advised a number of presidential campaigns. “They are even less able to pick at this point in this cycle because Trump’s cast a big cloud over the field.”
While neither Charles nor David Koch has been considered likely to get behind a single primary candidate, those familiar with the billionaire industrialists’ plans say they’re more determined than before to keep their powder dry. The Kochs recognize the unpredictability Trump creates, and neither sees much upside in putting their considerable resources behind a primary contender.
Then there is Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas casino mogul who four years ago pumped millions into Newt Gingrich’s bid. Adelson, who is said to favor Marco Rubio, had been expected to pick his candidate sometime after the second debate. Now, however, those close to Adelson expect him to wait until the end of the year to make his selection.
“Things are in such disarray and the picture isn’t clear with Trump sucking the air out of the primary,” said one source close to the billionaire. “No one else has had a chance to shine.”
There’s no better example of that than Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who has surged in New Hampshire on the strength of his gubernatorial record and a positive, optimistic message. But even after $5 million in early TV ads, Kasich polls in second place with 12 percent – far behind Trump, who has 28 percent in the state without spending a dime on TV there or anywhere else.
Bush, who has fallen to fourth place in New Hampshire, will air his campaign’s first TV ads in the Granite State starting Wednesday, with his super PAC set to follow suit the following week. But thanks to Trump, it’s an open question whether it will make a difference.
“Three of four months ago I never imagined we were headed for a circus, but it is – one that includes elephants, everything,” said GOP media guru Alex Castellanos. “I don’t think we ever imagined how not only angry, but how desperately anxious Republicans are about losing our country. A hunk of Republicans just want a strongman as big as our fears.”