Numbers just aren’t adding up for billionaire candidate

Donald Trump is having a bad month.

Not only are his poll numbers slipping, they are at a low that no one, Republican or Democrat, has seen at this time in the campaign in more than 15 years.

“There’s no way to look at Trump’s national polling that avoids the grim reality that he is at a lower ebb than any general election candidate has hit in the last three elections,” the National Review’s Dan McLaughlin wrote last week.

Comparing the window of time between 200 and 100 days before each of the last three elections, you can see that Trump has consistently polled worse than George W. Bush in 2004, John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012.

The margin by which he trails Hillary Clinton now mirrors McCain’s deficit to Barack Obama in 2008. McCain rebounded after the Republican convention — but then again, his campaign ended up the worst Republican performance in a general election since 1996.

There’s every reason to think that Trump’s numbers will get worse. He essentially has no campaign at this point; there’s no sign that he has started staffing up significantly. On Friday, The Associated Press reported that Trump intended, in effect, to outsource his campaign to the Republican Party.

On Sunday morning, NBC News’s Mark Murray shared numbers on ad spending by Trump and Clinton. In June 2012, the Romney campaign and PACs supporting it spent about $38 million (U.S.) on ads in battleground states — a bit behind the $44.6 million spent by Obama and his allies.

This June? Trump is getting skunked by Clinton, who is spending millions in key swing states.

The current gap in ad spending exists because Trump can’t or won’t spend money on ads, just as he can’t or won’t spend money on staff. In the past, he didn’t need to spend because he got so much free media.

In essence, Trump is running a real-time experiment in a new form of presidential campaigning.

And the early numbers suggest that the experiment is shaping up to be a failure.