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Supporters of Donald Trump got an unexpected plea on Saturday: a request to send the billionaire money.
It was an "emergency" request, the Hill reported, representing an urgent need for an infusion of $100,000 to put ads on the air in battleground states. Why Trump couldn't simply write a check to cover the costs apparently wasn't explained, but the missive was useful regardless: It demonstrates clearly the difficult position of the Trump campaign with only 142 days to go.
We looked at Trump's sliding poll numbers on Friday, but it's worth adding a bit more context.
"[T]here’s no way to look at Trump’s national polling that avoids the grim reality that he is at a lower ebb than any general election candidate has hit in the last three elections," the National Review's Dan McLaughlin wrote last week.
Not only are Trump's poll numbers slipping, they are at a low that no one, Republican or Democrat, has seen in the past three election cycles. Looking at the window of time between 200 and 100 days before each of those elections, you can see that Trump has consistently polled worse than George W. Bush in 2004, John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012. He caught up briefly after clinching the GOP nomination — and then sank again.
The margin by which he trails Hillary Clinton now mirrors McCain's deficit to Barack Obama in 2008. McCain rebounded after the Republican convention — but it's important to remember that we're comparing Trump to the worst Republican performance in a general election since 1996.
There's every reason to think that those numbers will get worse. Trump essentially has no campaign at this point; there's no sign that he has started staffing up significantly. We looked this month at how his staffing compared with the two final Democratic candidates. His campaign was never a traditional, national effort.
Read more @: Donald Trump’s campaign manager is out. Here are the brutal numbers that tell us why
Trailing far behind in the polls, just now starting a fundraising effort, virtually no staff, not focusing on swing states. Trump is utterly ****ed. Its gonna take a miracle for him to win the general (thank god)