• by Philip Rosenstein , Staff Writer, November 4, 2016

Trump rode the earned-media wave throughout the primary cycle and landed the Republican nomination with no apparent digital operation.

This completely changed as the general election developed, with the Trump campaign quietly building a robust team of data scientists and analysts that rivals any modern-day political digital operation.

Based in San Antonio, the Trump team built an appropriately if not bluntly named database: “The Alamo.”

“When we won the nomination, we decided we were going to do digital fundraising and really ramp this thing up to the next level,” a senior advisor in the Trump campaign told Bloomberg Businessweek. The official added that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, “reached out to some Silicon Valley people who are kind of covert Trump fans and experts in digital marketing. They taught us about scaling.”

“There’s really not that much of a difference between politics and regular marketing.”

What they built adds up to a 100+ person team of contractors and employees, including data scientists from Cambridge Analytica, the firm hired by Ted Cruz’s primary campaign. Red, White & Blog spoke with Alexander Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica back in February about the digital operation they were running for Cruz.

“This is really the ground zero of the Trump campaign. It’s not the few dozen folks at Trump Tower,” Joshua Green of Bloomberg Businessweek told Jacob Weisberg on Slate’s Trumpcast. A traditional get-out-the-vote (GOTV) still doesn’t really exist; Project Alamo is the core of the campaign’s marketing and advertising operation.

Green said the curious thing about the Trump campaign’s approach is that it is not engaging in traditional political behavior.

It is not running the large-dollar fundraisers we’ve seen with Clinton or Romney. The GOTV operation is outsourced to the RNC; the campaign hasn’t been pushing big TV ad buys until recently.

What Trump has been extremely successful in doing, however, is cultivating a base of small donors who are hard-core Trump supporters. When Kushner went out to Silicon Valley, he found that Facebook ads and “spammy”-type ads are the quickest, cheapest ways to build a “universe of small Trump donors,” explained Green.

Green, who visited the Trump San Antonio operation with a colleague, told Weisberg the Trump campaign had compiled around 12 million emails and gained 2.5 million small donors. Together, they donated around $235 million for the Trump campaign since June.

The approach is probably a good bet for the Trump camp.

The only way Trump can win on November 8 is by intensely driving their core supporters to the polls. Winning over minority voters or college-educated women with a digital operation seems impossible, in light of ads the Clinton campaign is running.

Further, if he doesn’t win, that 12 million person roster is not too shabby an audience to launch TrumpTV.