Nearly everyone can agree that Donald Trump’s path to the White House goes through Pennsylvania.

But local party leaders in some of the state’s most pivotal counties say there’s been almost no outreach from his campaign so far, and there’s scant evidence of any Trump-driven ground organization. What infrastructure is in place lags behind the Democratic coordinated campaign on behalf of Hillary Clinton.


“The good news is, the level of enthusiasm for Mr. Trump in this county is the strongest I’ve ever seen for anyone,” said Michael Korns, Republican chairman of Westmoreland County, the second biggest in western Pennsylvania and the site of a Trump speech on Tuesday. “The bad news is, the resources at our disposal are by far the worst I’ve ever seen in any campaign, at least in any presidential campaign.”

“The Trump campaign has not specifically reached out to me,” said Bill Urbanski, the GOP chair of Wilkes Barre’s Luzerne County, a populous county in northeastern Pennsylvania where, according to a recent Republican poll, Trump led by 17 points.

Trump will need a heavy turnout in counties places like Luzerne and Westmoreland to offset Clinton’s advantages in the two big-city Democratic strongholds on either end of the state, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

So far, though, local officials report little interaction with the Trump campaign.

“I’ve not had much contact directly from the campaign,” said David Show, Republican Party chairman of Fayette County in southwestern Pennsylvania. Fayette gave Trump 70 percent of the vote in the primary. “State party-wise, they’re starting to get more active, but as far as direct contact with the Trump campaign, no. I haven’t heard much.”

“The state committee, the state party has people on the ground,” said Bill Donnelly, the chairman of the Montgomery County GOP in suburban Philadelphia. “The Trump people themselves I haven’t heard from.”

When there is outreach, Korns said, it’s not always from credible or official sources.

“There are a number of individuals, with varying levels of authority, some self-appointed, some not, that sort of float around on that campaign, so it’s definitely been a bit of a learning curve on our end,” Korns said.

Trump’s strategy differs from past nominees in that it cedes organizational control and direction to the Republican National Committee and the state party. And several GOP county leaders stressed that the state Republican Party is in contact with Trump’s operation — Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager, has been in touch with the GOP state chair, as has Jim Murphy, the campaign’s new political director.

Local officials noted that the state and local parties were working hard on the GOP nominee’s behalf, in coordination with the Republican National Committee, which has 54 paid staffers in Pennsylvania and “hundreds of trained organizers and volunteers,” according to a spokeswoman.

“No other campaign, committee, or organization has been doing this for as long as we have,” said RNC spokeswoman Lindsay Walters, adding that the RNC has had a presence in Pennsylvania since 2013. “We are the infrastructure for the entire GOP ticket. And the Trump campaign has embraced that.”

But that hasn’t changed the perception on the ground that Trump’s organizational effort is lagging.

“At this point, and it’s getting late in the game, they don’t yet have any ground game going on here,” said a prominent Pennsylvania Republican operative. “It takes a lot of time to put together an efficient and smooth-operating ground effort. They don’t have anything at this point. They can’t just come waltzing in here and expect it’s all going to fall into place.”

Korns said that he has seen an RNC presence, but of the Trump effort, he said, “They don’t yet have any sort of field-level staffers, at least that I’ve interacted with, that are paid, which is unusual at this point in a campaign. Four years ago, we did have multiple staffers available, and that’s not here yet.”

On the Democratic side, the Clinton campaign has been organizing more aggressively, in coordination with state and local organizations, according to Democratic and Republican operatives on the ground.

“Hillary has a lot of forces in place, and she will use them to her advantage, and Trump doesn’t have a competing force, at least not right now,” the GOP source said.

John Cordisco, the Democratic chairman of Bucks County, said that he’s already had a meeting at Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters, in which a staffer overseeing several Northeastern states sketched out the game plan for the Philadelphia-area battleground suburb, explaining that the Clinton campaign prioritized it and intended to provide support there.

Both statewide and regional representatives from the Clinton campaign are regularly in touch with county chairs, said Nancy Patton Mills, the Democratic chair of Pittsburgh’s Allegheny County.

“We have a full staff of Clinton people here in our main office and moving into other areas of Pittsburgh,” she said. “We also hear from ... [state director] Corey Dukes. We have a regional representative here in Western Pennsylvania for Hillary Clinton as well, so we’re really in touch.”

The Trump campaign didn’t directly answer on Tuesday and Wednesday when asked whether it currently had a state director or how many staffers they had on the ground.

“We have a tremendous team in place, many of whom were instrumental in our successful primary election,” spokeswoman Hope Hicks said Wednesday. “Announcements of several additional staffers are imminent.”

Hicks directed questions for the story to national political director Jim Murphy, who didn’t respond to a detailed set of questions about the campaign’s infrastructure on the ground.

Later Wednesday, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that David Urban, former Sen. Arlen Specter’s chief of staff, would serve as senior adviser in Pennsylvania, and GOP operative Ted Christian would serve as state director. They have some catching up to do: Dukes has been in place as Clinton's state director for nearly two months. In 2012, Mitt Romney didn’t prioritize Pennsylvania until the end of the campaign but had a state director and state spokeswoman in place by mid-June.





Rep. Bob Brady, who doubles as the Democratic Party chairman in Philadelphia, said that in his city, Dukes and other Clinton and Democratic staffers are frequently in contact with him and the local ward leaders who still dominate city politics.

“Anytime they go in, they let ward leaders know, they let elected officials know,” he said. “That’s showing proper respect to the right people in the city of Philadelphia, and we appreciate it.”

The Republicans are just as, if not better, organized, insisted Pennsylvania GOP Chairman Rob Gleason. It’s just that their organizational structure comes from the state party and the RNC, rather than the official campaign. The state party, he said, has been working with the RNC to plan for the race “for three years.”

“We have enough people, we have a plan, we’re executing the plan,” he said, declining to reveal details about the plan, other than to “get one more vote than Mrs. Clinton.”

“I suspect there may be more Trump people [coming], but it doesn’t even matter,” he said. “Trump or Republican, we’re all Republicans, we’ll get to the same end: to win for Trump, for [Sen. Pat] Toomey, our congressmen, and lots of elected Republicans in Pennsylvania.”

So far, all of that Democratic organizing has yet to translate into a concrete polling lead for Clinton: She leads by less than 3 percentage points according to the RealClearPolitics polling average and Priorities USA, the pro-Clinton super PAC, recently added Pennsylvania to its ad spending list.

And Show, the GOP chairman from Fayette County, expressed confidence that Trump, through sheer force of personality — and simply by visiting the area, as he did Tuesday—would cause GOP turnout to spike in the fall.

But Korns, the Westmoreland County chair, noted that for all of the state and national efforts on the ground, that’s no substitute for a real campaign presence that will focus singularly on the presidential contest, rather than on the entire ticket.

“If there’s any message I can get to that campaign, it’s give us the resources,” he said, expressing optimism that aid from the campaign will eventually come. “We’re there for you, but we need help.”