Trump’s campaign operation upends conventional wisdom

Published 9:10 am Thursday, August 27, 2015

NEWARK, N.J. — Not only is Donald Trump an unconventional candidate, he’s got a campaign operation that turns the conventional wisdom of electoral politics on its head.

While Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton boasts an army of more than 350 paid staffers, Trump’s operation fields less than a tenth that number.

It includes a coterie of about a dozen paid staffers operating out of the campaign headquarters at Trump Tower on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue — the same building where Trump lives and runs his real estate empire.

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His team has no pollster, fundraisers or media consultant and only announced its first fulltime, big-name policy adviser this week.

The rest of the 25 or so paid members of the Trump campaign are mostly in the early- voting states of New Hampshire, Iowa and South Carolina, states where the billionaire businessman-turned-reality TV host is ahead in polls, leaving the Republican establishment scratching its head.