Does Trump Have Dementia or is He A Genius?

[thesquanderer]

28. re: *Somebody* ran a successful campaign to win the presidency for Trump"

Trump was clearly way behind in the popular vote. It only took one person to see where the possible electoral college path was. That somebody may have been Brad Parscale.

from http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/mercers/

Parscale and Bannon quickly bonded, seeing each other as fellow outsiders and true Trump loyalists. Bannon told Parscale: “I don't care how you get it done—get it done. Use {Cambridge Analytica} as much or as little as you want.” ...But he had his own theory of how Trump could secure victory—in the final weeks, he advised Trump to visit Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, three states no one thought Trump could take.
...
Parscale has told people that the campaign’s previous models had been based on high turnout figures. “I started to run models with lower turnout which looked like the midterm elections of 2014,” he has said. “I mapped out how, based on that, we could get to 305 electoral college votes.” Trump got 304.
...
On election night at Trump Tower...Parscale, unlike almost everyone else, including Trump’s children, was convinced his boss was going to win.

His theory was that, with two unpopular candidates, turnout would be low, and to plan the strategy accordingly. Ironically, turnout was not low, but the strategy to focus on those states worked anyway. (Though Wisconsin did happen to be one of the few states where turnout was below 2012.)