WASHINGTON — With fewer than three months before Election Day, in the states that matter most, Donald Trump’s campaign is still barely operating field offices and running no television ads in key states.

On the ground, some are confused as to who is calling the shots — his campaign or Republican state and national organizations that have picked up the slack. In North Carolina, it’s not entirely clear where the campaign is headquartered. In Ohio and Pennsylvania, volunteers have opened makeshift field offices.

Some are advising that the Republican National Committee, which is running its planned robust field operation, cut off money to the Trump campaign and focus on other races — something that an RNC staffer acknowledged to BuzzFeed News could be a possibility.

There's been no public shift in the RNC's stance toward Trump; chairman Reince Priebus made a surprise appearance with him at a Pennsylvania rally last week. But Trump’s drag on down-ballot candidates has not gone unnoticed. “I think that there is a possibility that could happen,” the staffer told BuzzFeed News of a potential move to cut off Trump. “I think over the last seven to 10 days or one to two weeks, there’s been a great deal of frustration at the top of the ticket.”

The staffer said that such a shift would be “quiet” and not announced publicly. And it would not necessarily be evident in the ground game: “When you’re going door to door, the investment to ask one more question about the national ticket doesn’t change your resources. Where you would see it would be in paid efforts and TV and all that kind of stuff.”

According to Politico, RNC strategist Sean Spicer made the case for a move to focus on down-ballot races and cut off Trump by October in an off-the-record meeting with reporters last week, to which Politico and BuzzFeed News were not invited. Spicer did not return a request for comment on Sunday morning. The Trump campaign also did not return a request for comment.



Besides the controversies, a core complaint with Trump is that his campaign is doing little to organize and mobilize voters, or assist the RNC’s efforts. Sources say the campaign is also beset by poor communication between different levels of the organization, and there’s confusion over who is calling the shots in various state organizations.

“They have had a lot of trouble integrating original Trump staff with new folks,” said one Republican operative familiar with the campaign. “And they have regional directors whose authority level is very unclear over states in their region.”

“I think there has been a level of the Trump campaign trying to come in and act like they are the big boys on the block as opposed to a partnership,” said one RNC staffer.

In key swing states like Florida, the campaign has been operating a bare-bones operation, with one office in Sarasota and four staff. The RNC currently has 75 staffers on the ground in Florida, as well as 1,400 volunteers and fellows in charge of local organizing.

“From the RNC’s perspective, if you’re looking at those states, we’ve been on the ground in those states since 2013,” said RNC spokesman Rick Gorka. “There was an early investment in the ground game to fix what went wrong [in 2012]."

Karen Giorno, the campaign’s chief Florida strategist, said that the operation will be expanding soon, and that the campaign is adding up to 25 more offices and is in the process of hiring 14 more full-time staff. The campaign is opening an office near the site of the Pulse shooting in Orlando, Bloomberg reported.

But Giorno sees less need for a traditional approach to the ground game because of Trump’s near-universal name recognition and the large attendance at his rallies, and she sounded confident about her approach when interviewed outside Trump’s Kissimmee rally last week. “I’m not big on bricks and mortar and office spaces because as you can see we have a very unique kind of campaign,” Giorno said. Giorno says she’s still relying on the large attendance at Trump’s rallies to reach voters. And she cited the campaign’s social media outreach, saying her team has a 100% response rate to social media queries from voters.

“This is the best type of outreach you can possibly have,” Giorno said of the rallies. “He’s touching over 40,000 people in two days.”

“I think we win this handily,” Giorno said. “I would be hard pressed to say that the Clinton campaign is doing anything to move the dial.”