Kellyanne Conway's campaign approach: You don't pick a fight with the ref or boo the crowd
The general election, as Donald Trump’s new campaign manager sees it, needs to be more like a tennis match. It requires focus and knowing who your opponents are. You need to take on Hillary Clinton, the media and President Obama, Kellyanne Conway told Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom” Wednesday.
“You look across at the net and you keep lobbing at her. You don’t pick a fight with the ref. You don’t boo the crowd,” Conway said. She added, “We’re concerned, but that’s what campaigns are for. Campaigns are exactly for executing every day, your message to candidate appearance, media interviews, ground game again, making people feel like they have the equipment they need.”
Conway, who is a pollster, had been a senior adviser to the Trump campaign before the move up to campaign manager, a job she has never held. During the primary campaign, she ran a super PAC that supported Ted Cruz. Conway said that the new additions to the top of the campaign organization do not constitute a shakeup.
Conway told Fox’s Bill Hemmer and Martha McCallum, “I know some are calling it a shakeup, but it really is not. It doesn’t feel that way.” Rather, the demands of the general election are the reason for the expansion of the top tier of the team, Conway argued, adding that the campaign is also “beefing up” field and data operations.
In terms of what she’ll be doing on the campaign, reporters can probably expect to see a lot of Conway on the trail with Trump.
“I think my role will be TV but also flying on the Mr. Trump more, and certainly working with our many different messaging partners and our coalitions,” Conway told Fox. “Just to make sure we are all coordinating and doing together.”
But the campaign message could be returning to the Corey Lewandowski school of “Let Trump be Trump.” The Associated Press reported that Trump has become frustrated by disappointing poll numbers, his advisers’ attempts to moderate his style, and what he views as disloyalty from Republicans who have failed to come to his aid, and he believes that he can turn his fortunes around by returning to a more verbally aggressive style. The AP also said that the changes to the campaign were worked out at a senior staff meeting at Trump Tower while Trump himself was not in the room -- during the time that he was campaigning Tuesday.
The changes in the campaign, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, came as the Associated Press published its own report saying that Manafort had helped a pro-Russia Ukrainian political party secretly route at least $2.2 million in payments to two Washington lobbying firms in 2012, “in a way that effectively obscured the party’s efforts to influence U.S. policy.
The Associated Press reported Wednesday that Manafort helped the party secretly route at least $2.2 million in payments to two prominent Washington lobbying firms in 2012, doing so in a way that effectively obscured the party’s efforts to influence U.S. policy.