Math beats mouth.

Donald Trump plans to defeat Hillary Clinton through blustery force of will and word — but the architect of Ted Cruz’s efficient, numbers-focused campaign thinks Trump is making a huge mistake by burning the modern electoral playbook.


Jeff Roe, a burly and self-deprecating 43-year-old former baseball umpire and onetime howitzer-crew hand, estimates that the presumptive Republican nominee is costing himself from 2.5 to 5.5 percentage points nationally by refusing to invest more time, energy and cash in data, analytics and a first-rate ground operation.

By any calculation those are precious points that Trump, who faces an uphill climb against Hillary Clinton on the electoral map — and has trailed the Democratic nominee in most polls — can’t afford to lose.

“He dumped our ass, right? He won, we lost, so let's keep everything in perspective,” Roe told me during a 90-minute interview for POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast that quickly turned into an intense tutorial in Republican campaign strategy and management — and a warning to the man who beat his boss.

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“There's a trove of information that's done in and around politics” that Trump needs to tap, said Roe, who credits Cruz’s big win in the Iowa caucuses to the campaign’s identification and targeting of precisely 9,181 voters who were undecided but had Cruz and Trump as their final choices.

“It’s worth, on its worst day, 2½ points, and in its best day, 5½ points,” he added. “So let’s just split the difference and say that Clinton’s running a great [operation]. ... He’s not right now, so that would give her ... 3½ points.”

In May, Trump, who has the smallest and least experienced staff of any recent presidential campaign, told The Associated Press he thought President Barack Obama’s vaunted get-out-the-vote machine was a chimera, and that Obama really won on account of his own personal popularity, Trump-style.

“I’ve always felt it was overrated,” Trump said, using language that conjured up images of green-eyeshade clerks feeding punch cards into 1970s computers. “Obama got the votes much more so than his data processing machine. And I think the same is true with me.”

In the absence of his own operation — or even an understanding of how the increasingly sophisticated system of identifying voters through their purchases, political activities and other demographic information works — Trump is relying on the Republican National Committee’s relatively modest voter outreach department.

Big, big mistake, Roe told me.

“I don’t know everything that he has, but I do know a couple of things,” he said. “It’s going to be very hard for him to just use the RNC. The RNC has got a very candidate-generic model. ... [In Iowa,] we knew voters’ names and what they cared about and how they received their information.”

Roe is still close to Cruz and says his boss, like Obama, gobbles political intelligence and data like a professional, with insights candidates of previous eras (and Trump is nothing if not stubbornly retro) lacked.

Over the next few weeks Cruz’s team, still largely intact, will conduct an autopsy of the campaign from a data and messaging standpoint and dial-test Cruz’s greatest hits and lowest moments with voter focus groups. The goal is to figure out a path forward, which quite possibly involves a second shot at the big prize in 2020, and Roe thinks Trump, win or lose in 2016, won’t be on the ballot four years from now.

“If Trump wins, I can’t imagine that he’d be in a reelect, right?” he asked. “He’s already reached the mountain. You don’t climb Kilimanjaro twice if you’re him.”

Cruz, conspicuously, remains the biggest GOP name not to endorse Trump. The reason, Roe said, is partly Trump’s decision to go “very personal” on the senator’s family, but also a professional calculation (with overtones of sweet revenge): Despite Trump’s claim that he’ll bring new independents into the process, 2016 promises to be the same-old base election and he’ll need the hard-core conservatives “Lyin’ Ted” was so good at galvanizing.

Is it possible Cruz won’t endorse?

“Gosh. Yeah. Yeah, for sure, that's possible,” said Roe, adding that he’s had only “sporadic” contact with Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, talking or texting a half-dozen times since Cruz suspended his campaign a month back. “I mean, if you learn anything from “The Art of the Deal”, [it] is you have leverage, you have something that somebody wants. Don’t ever act like you want to make a deal until you make a deal, OK?”

Then he smiled and eased back in his chair. “Trump told Ted, ‘I don't need his votes,’” Roe said, with relish. “OK? So that’s one way to look at it. If, at some point in the campaign, he believes he needs the votes and he believes that [they’re] key to him winning, then the conservatives will have leverage, and I think that's really damn important leverage. ... [We’ll be] able to hold him accountable.”

He refused to say whether Trump has asked Cruz to climb on board yet.

Roe says Cruz’s surprising success was the candidate’s doing and not that of his 150-person Houston-based staff. But Republicans on opposing campaigns credit Roe’s stewardship, including an intense focus on metrics found more often in Democratic campaigns, for the Texas senator’s tempered triumph. (“Jeff’s pretty good. Cruz won what — nine states? — and everybody thinks he’s the Zodiac [killer],” said one former opponent, referencing an online joke that dogged Cruz during the campaign.)

It’s not surprising that Roe, who shares his boss’s conservative social views as well as his delight in torturing more moderate Hill Republicans, doesn’t think much of Clinton’s policy positions or her personal political skills. But he’s a fan of Obama’s 2008 and 2012 operations and thinks Trump would be wise to notice the plodding but effective ground campaign she waged against Bernie Sanders.

“From an Xs-and-Os [perspective]… through a nonpartisan lens, they clearly have that part of their game buttoned up,” he said of Clinton’s Brooklyn-based operation, overseen by campaign manager Robbie Mook and an analytics and organizing team that includes many former Obama operatives.

“They're not crushing fundraising, but they're raising good money. They're not crushing ground, but they're doing it really smart and effective. ... [Clinton voters] have little energy, but they’re overperforming their election night numbers routinely. That tells me that they know what they’re doing on the ground.”

Roe, who came up in the sharp-elbowed world of Missouri politics and has been known for his own stiletto tactics, offered a few lacerating comments about both major party candidates and their stratospheric disapproval ratings. “The irony,” he said with a chuckle, “is that these people found the only person in the other party they could beat.”

Even though he dismisses the complaint that Cruz, who buddied up to Trump in early debates, waited too long to pounce, he acknowledges that the crowded field denied the Texas senator the chance to go one-on-one with the reality star.

And he thinks that’s the key to beating him.

Trump won, in part, because the pack was divided and because Cruz failed to move Marco Rubio and John Kasich aside quickly enough. “Yeah, we could take him [mano a mano], yeah, no doubt,” Roe told me.

In a general election, Trump no longer enjoys the safety of the GOP herd. And with Sanders sliding offstage, Clinton has begun focusing her attacks exclusively on the real-estate mogul, something that didn’t happen until relatively late in the Republican primaries. “Taking on Trump is smart,” Roe said of her decision to hit the GOP nominee before decisively defeating Sanders in California earlier this month. “It will be the thing that saves her.”

When Cruz finally got tough, Trump began dodging debates — and Roe predicted he’ll soon find an excuse to limit his onstage interactions with Clinton despite the widespread view that Trump’s attacks will make Clinton look weak and beatable.

“I don't know that they'll have one. ... I bet if they do, they only have one,” he said of potential debates. “Everybody’s going to bake it into the cake that she’s going to win, and he’s going to look like a fool and say the same things over and over. She will have the apparatus to have the time to prepare. Trump’s his own guy. He’ll be tired.

“I’m sure he’s going to do one, and he’ll call it a draw. He’ll win the Drudge poll afterwards,” Roe added.