Donald Trump, dismissive of campaign pollsters, hired his own
Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee who long dismissed the usefulness of campaign pollsters, has hired pollster Tony Fabrizio. The veteran GOP consultant officially announced the move himself Tuesday.
“Excited to help @realDonaldTrump continue to make history by stopping another 4 years of Obama policies to #MakeAmericaGreatAgain!” he wrote on Twitter.
Fabrizio’s hiring is part of a broader Trump campaign effort to professionalize its operations in order to prepare for a general election campaign against likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
A person familiar with the matter told Yahoo News that Fabrizio will be focused on surrogates, strategy and survey research for targeting voters. Trump, the person said, “will continue to do his own messaging.”
During the Republican primary, the poll-obsessed Trump boasted that he doesn’t “want to waste money on pollsters” to determine his campaign message. He also openly mocked his rivals for investing in internal polling.
“The networks do it for free,” he reportedly remarked in January, referring to surveys published by cable news networks. “What the hell are they doing polling for?”
Campaigns typically use internal polling data to find out much more than simply who’s leading and by how much. Among other things, campaign pollsters test how potential arguments, positive and negative, resonate with different voters.
And Fabrizio’s history suggests he may fit well with Trump’s unorthodox approach to the campaign trail. He worked with another longtime Trump confidant, Roger Stone, on Carl Paladino’s unsuccessful New York gubernatorial campaign in 2010. Like Trump, Paladino is a New York businessman who railed against “political correctness” while running for office.
Fabrizio is a veteran of various other high-profile races, including past GOP presidential campaigns like Rand Paul’s earlier this year, Rick Perry’s in 2012 and Bob Dole’s in 1996. Last summer, he tweeted a “great” article by columnist George Will, who called Trump a “counterfeit Republican.”
As Politico’s Marc Caputo noted Monday when he broke the news of Fabrizio’s hire, the consultant was one of the architects of the infamous Willie Horton ad, which Republican George H.W. Bush used to help take down Democrat Michael Dukakis in the 1988 race.
Critics say the Horton ad stoked racial anxieties by using an African-American convicted felon to portray Dukakis as weak on crime. Trump’s own critics similarly accuse him of stirring racial anxieties by deploying caustic rhetoric against Muslims and illegal immigrants from Mexico.
Caputo described Fabrizio as widely respected among those who know him. In addition to Stone, top Trump adviser Paul Manafort is also reportedly Fabrizio’s friend.
“Tony is flat out one of the smartest dudes I know. He proved it with Rick Scott — much to my personal detriment, he knows how to take a deeply flawed candidate and sell them to the voters,” Democratic strategist Steve Schale told Politico, referring to both Trump and Florida Gov. Rick Scott. “If I was a Republican running for president or dogcatcher, I’d want him in my corner.”
