In the lead-up to Donald Trump’s loss in Iowa, staffers sought additional funding for campaign infrastructure and were denied.

Now, six days from the New Hampshire primary and looking for his first win, Trump is still refusing to shake up his ground game. He has added just one paid organizer in the state, a move that came a month ago. Instead, he is pushing ahead with plans to campaign outside of the state in the final week of voting and will count on the glamour of famous surrogates, including his sons, who plan to tour New Hampshire beginning this weekend.


Even as Republicans here warn that Trump does not appear to have the ground game to match his sky-high expectations and the campaign grapples with internal disagreements about investments in infrastructure, campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said Trump should and would stay the course heading into Tuesday's primary.

“Two completely separate states, two very different races,” he said. “No Republican in the history of the modern Republican Party other than an incumbent president has won both the states of Iowa and New Hampshire.”

Trump enjoys much larger polling leads in New Hampshire and South Carolina than he did in Iowa — and voter turnout efforts matter less in these primary states than in caucus states.

But there is tension inside the Trump campaign about the robustness of its field and data operations. One person familiar with the disagreements said Trump’s state directors have been denied funding for their field and data requests.

And a Trump ally who recently conferred with the campaign’s national political director, Michael Glassner, said Glassner was exploring an upgrade of the campaign’s data capabilities in the run-up to Iowa but was unable to secure funding for it. Glassner did not respond to a request for comment.

“Having Eventbrite names and email addresses isn’t campaign data. It’s nice, but you need voter files,” said a person who has worked with the campaign and who called the lack of interest in data “very frustrating.”

On Tuesday, Trump conceded that he did not invest enough in his Iowa infrastructure. “In retrospect, we could have done much better with the ground game,” he said on Fox News.

But while the campaign has shifted resources into the first primary state, that move amounted to a single staffer — Stuart Jolly, a former Americans for Prosperity operative brought onto the campaign to focus on the Southern states that vote on March 1.

One person familiar with the move said Jolly was brought in because New Hampshire state director Matt Ciepielowski, a 2011 college graduate, was “in over his head.”

Another person said the campaign has always planned to push Jolly to New Hampshire in the weeks before the Iowa caucuses when Lewandowski, a New Hampshire resident, shifted his focus to the first voting contest.

Lewandowski said that he and press secretary Hope Hicks have arrived in New Hampshire to oversee the final effort, as they did last week in Iowa, and that Glassner would arrive in the state on Thursday.

And on Wednesday afternoon, the campaign announced it was putting up a new television spot in New Hampshire that highlights the energy of his raucous campaign rallies as part of an $850,000 ad buy placed last week.

Republicans in the state predict those moves will be insufficient for Trump’s campaign to deliver on the expectations of a blowout the candidates has set by constantly touting on the stump public polling figures that show him leading by more than 20 percentage points in the state.

“He does not have a strong organization in New Hampshire,” said Republican operative Ryan Williams, a former aide to Mitt Romney in New Hampshire and a former communications director for the state party. “It’s kind of a ragtag bunch of staffers that didn’t catch on with any of the mainstream campaigns.”

Lewandowski responded, “Ryan Williams is a paid staffer to the Bush campaign via [Bush campaign manager] Danny Diaz’s firm. It is no surprise that Mr. Williams is trying to save his job after the Bush campaign has wasted tens of millions of dollars in NH and is still in the low single digits.” (Williams works for FP1 strategies, a firm that Diaz co-founded and that has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Bush campaign).

Said former Gov. John H. Sununu, “One of the keys to building an organization is you have to be here a lot, so you can draw your own conclusion from that.” Unlike Chris Christie, Jeb Bush and John Kasich, who have all blanketed the state with appearances, Trump has spread his campaign rallies across the country. He spent Wednesday in Little Rock and will travel to South Carolina on Friday.

“They’re not working hard up here. They’re just not,” said Williams. “They’re taking New Hampshire for granted given the polling, but there’s a real chance he could lose.”