Stepanek said Trump campaign officials had grown frustrated with a lack of staff on the ground in the swing state, complaining in weekly meetings with local Republican officials that 10 staffers was insufficient at this point in the race.

“Eric was not executing as fast as they wanted him to, as far as hiring people and bringing people up to speed,” he said. “He wasn’t getting the job done quick enough.”

Mitchell, who deleted his Twitter account on Dec. 13, could not be reached for comment on Tuesday. Several local senior party members reached on Tuesday evening said they hadn’t heard of Mitchell, who served as deputy director of the Michigan Republican Party during the 2018 election cycle — a role he was elevated to just months after graduating from the University of Notre Dame.

It is unclear who originally recommended him for the position in New Hampshire, where he was in charge of day-to-day campaign responsibilities and coordinating visits from the president’s top surrogates. One of the individuals who interviewed him for the position was unaware that he had been fired.

RNC spokesman Rick Gorka said in a statement: “This is a small personnel change, which is bound to happen in any large organization. I can tell you we are so far ahead right now versus where we were in 2016.”

Gorka declined to provide further details about Mitchell’s departure, which caught multiple officials involved with the New Hampshire Trump campaign off guard.

“That’s an HR issue that we’re not going to be going into,” he said.

One campaign volunteer who worked closely with Mitchell described him as “easy to work with and always willing to listen.”

“He genuinely cared and was excited for the opportunity,” this person said.

Others said he repeatedly clashed with RNC officials inside the party’s Washington headquarters, who insisted on approving each decision Mitchell was responsible for making — from where to set up an office for the New Hampshire Trump Victory Team to the volume of campaign merchandise he was permitted to order for volunteers. Campaign officials based in New Hampshire are still working out of RNC offices, and POLITICO could not locate a working phone number for the Trump campaign’s home base in the state.

The sudden departure of the Trump campaign’s state director has left officials without a point person in one of its 17 “target states” for the 2020 cycle, where paid staffers have been operating on the ground since early spring. Campaign manager Brad Parscale has repeatedly suggested New Hampshire, where Trump secured his first primary victory in 2016, is a state that can be moved into the president’s column next November.

“After four years of the Trump presidency, we are confident that New Hampshire will reject the socialist government takeover agenda of the Democrats and instead vote to continue the successes of the Trump presidency,” Parscale and RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said in a joint statement announcing Mitchell’s hire earlier this summer.

Unlike South Carolina and Nevada — early-voting states where pro-Trump factions pushed to cancel the Republican primaries to consolidate support for the president — New Hampshire voters are likely to see multiple Republican options when primary voting occurs in February. Former Rep. Joe Walsh of Illinois and former Gov. Bill Weld of Massachusetts, who both filed paperwork last month, are each expected to appear on the New Hampshire ballot as GOP presidential contenders.

A CNN poll conducted by the University of New Hampshire in late October found a majority (51 percent) of voters in the Granite State opposed to impeaching and removing Trump from office. National polls, however, have found slightly higher support for impeachment among independent voters, a critical voting bloc in New Hampshire, which is known for its independent streak.

Natalie Fertig contributed reporting.