After winning wild-ride party primaries, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are now pivoting to the general election, looking ahead to the swing-state contests where the White House will be won or lost. In Colorado, the candidates are extending the distinct approaches they followed in the primary contests, and they are wildly different tacks.

Indeed, it’s hard not to view the Clinton and Trump Centennial State efforts to this point through the comic lens of their personalities reduced to stereotype.

Hillary-ness and Trump-ness

On the Clinton side in Colorado, there’s a steady hum of studied planning and preparedness. Hillary for Colorado has hired top staffers who are working with state political leaders, state candidate campaigns and the Colorado Democratic Party. The team strategy is to win Colorado “the way you have to win Colorado,” as one staffer put it, by turning out registered party members, courting the state’s rough 35 percent unaffiliated voter bloc, and wooing in particular women, latino and millennial voters.

The Trump campaign, meantime, is building buzz in the state by apparently doing nothing – at least nothing traditional. The candidate who dominated the media in the GOP primary simply by calling into TV shows and leveraging Twitter is building a state campaign by staying in front of national news cameras, drawing crowds to rallies far away from the state and allowing the national and state Republican parties to fill in the blanks.

But that’s not to say nothing traditional is happening behind the scenes for the real estate magnate’s campaign. Trump is said to be building a strong campaign finance network, with top-tier cash bundlers organizing in every state across the nation. A familiar name or two to serve as campaign finance chairs should rise to the top soon in the Centennial State to fill those roles.

At the end of April, the Clinton campaign tapped Emmy Ruiz as state director. Ruiz came straight from Nevada, where she delivered caucus victories for the Clinton camp that many viewed as crucial to finally turning the momentum in the primary race against Bernie Sanders. Ruiz has worked for Hillary Clinton election teams for years and was deputy field director for the Colorado state party in 2010.

On Thursday, two days after Clinton became the first woman in U.S. history to win a major party presidential primary, Ruiz moderated a “glass ceiling breakers roundtable” that streamed live on Facebook and featured Lt. Gov. Donna Lynne, state House Majority Leader Crisanta Duran, Senate President Lucia Guzman and Speaker of the House Dickey Lee Hullinghorst. Those ceiling-breaker women are but a small number of Democratic leaders in the state who have publicly endorsed Clinton, including Gov. John Hickenlooper and all four Democratic members of the congressional delegation. Hickenlooper’s famously networked chief policy officer, Alan Salazar, this week joined the Clinton Colorado team as a senior advisor.

At press time, the Trump campaign had appointed no state director for Colorado. For comparison, at this point in 2012, the Romney campaign had hired as state director James Garcia, former executive director of the Colorado Republican Party who already had been Romney’s National Field Director for a year. Reporters seeking information on the Trump plan for Colorado have been referred to the national campaign team, which The Colorado Statesman can confirm takes a famously maybe today, maybe never approach to returning messages from the media.

Nontraditionalism

That Trump is doing things different in Colorado should come as no surprise, said Patrick Davis, a Colorado Springs-based political consultant and one of the relatively few on-the-record Trump supporters among Colorado’s political class. Davis is a Trump alternate to the party’s national convention next month, and he was a consultant to the Trump campaign during the state Republican assembly at the end of April.

“Trump is a nontraditional candidate running a nontraditional campaign – and you are seeing that play out in Colorado,” Davis said. “There is no lack of interest. I talk to people every day who want to get involved – yard signs, volunteering, walking neighborhoods.

“But Trump is betting that voters are going to turn out in big numbers come November to vote for him, like they have been doing in the primaries throughout the country. He’s thinking, ‘Maybe I don’t have to spend half a year cajoling people to get off the couch, all that. He’s thinking he can keep doing what he’s doing, save months of resources, and hit it hard in the end. It’s how a businessman would approach campaigning.”

Davis said the angst people are feeling about the lack of a Trump state campaign organization can be written off when you “realize that all of that is just intended to get people motivated to vote and when you acknowledge that Trump really has had no trouble motivating people.”

“It’s a different campaign strategy,” Davis said, “and it may be brilliant.”

Republican U.S. Senate Candidate Robert Blaha agrees. Blaha has made no bones about his support of Trump now that Trump is the effective party nominee.

“Trump is uniting all kinds of voters – Reagan Democrats, Sanders supporters, people not interested in politics. I mean, people are interested in his press conferences – press conferences! You tune in because you never know what’s going to happen. I’ll be thrilled to go around the state with him. He’ll fill every venue he visits in the state.”

Ryan Call, who was chair of the state Republican Party during the Romney campaign, agreed that comparing the Trump candidacy to traditional candidacies is only enlightening insofar as it illuminates contrasts.

“It’s just a totally different thing,” he said, laughing. But then noted that Trump had recently replaced political director Rick Wiley after a mere six-week tenure with veteran campaign hand Jim Murphy. Things may look different soon, Call said.

“It will understandably take some time to get up to speed, but Jim is a very competent and experienced person who I’m confident will do a great job.”

Work for every vote

Ruiz told The Statesman that the state Clinton campaign is hiring field staff and is conducting trainings this week. She said the coordinated campaign efforts are underway – that the Democratic National Committee and the state Clinton campaign are teaming with state party efforts and the campaigns of U.S. Senator Michael Bennet and 3rd Congressional District candidate Gail Schwartz to conduct voter registration drives and recruiting volunteers. Ruiz has also hired a digital director.

Ruiz also went on at length about eventual efforts to win over Bernie Sanders supporters.

“I was in that position eight years ago, when President Obama defeated Hillary in the primary. We want to be really respectful and start by listening and working to build a campaign that all of our team can be proud of and build unity against Trump.”

Ruiz says, the lack of support among political leaders in Colorado for Trump is telling.

“It’s a different kind of year, I agree, but we have leaders across the state who have endorsed Clinton and are working for her election. They know experience matters for the presidency. She has come to Colorado and she has talked with Coloradans. Trump hasn’t even visited the state once … So we will build our organization, build coalitions, go out into the communities, keep our heads down, and work for every vote.”

Trump on the ground

It’s not really true, of course, that there is no organizing being done for the Trump candidacy in Colorado. Trump is leaning on the Republican National Committee and the RNC team in Colorado seems busy and confident, despite reports that a cash-strapped RNC is “scrambling” in the face of “frantic concerns” from state party officials that field operations are struggling, as Politico put it this week – thus Trump’s behind the scenes organizing of a finance team.

Colorado Party Chair Steve House estimated at the end of May that the RNC had a dozen staffers on the ground here, and the state party says that number is now closer to 30. RNC Colorado Communications Director Ali Pardo said people are looking for outdated signs of success.

“It’s not about the Clinton campaign versus the Trump campaign. You have to look at the Democratic Party versus the Republican Party,” she said Saturday at a well-attended volunteer training session in Denver, part of a national training day operation conducted by the RNC that brought out 5,000 party activists in 14 states. She noted that the DNC has lagged in its fundraising numbers and recently lost Political Director Raul Alvillar.

Pardo said the Republican national party and the Colorado Republican Party have been working the state since 2013. She said there were dozens of training sessions being held in the state Saturday and that more than 500 volunteers were “being activated” in June.

“We expect to knock on more doors today than we knocked in all of June 2012,” she said.

She said the RNC for this election has made the “longest field operation commitment in its history” and has hired the “largest staff on the ground in Colorado than ever before.” In Virginia, she said, the RNC tapped the Trump campaign’s supporter list and drew three times the amount of volunteers than they have in the past.

“Who can look at me and tell me that the excitement for this election is on the side of Michael Bennet and Hillary Clinton?” she said, her mouth open exaggeratedly, her eyebrows knitted in disbelief. “Trump gets us to the table for the general (election),” she added. “We’re looking to change the game.”

Emotional appeals

Staffers at the RNC Denver training – held at the libertarian Independence Institute – gave lessons to a crowd of about 50 volunteers on how to connect with voters through personal stories and walked them through a mobile campaign door-knocking app. There were also prizes promised for the participants who knocked the most doors.

The room seemed energized by the Trump candidacy. They were talking to each other in small groups. A woman at the back railed about Romney and his opposition to the Trump candidacy. “C’mon, Romney ran a terrible campaign, failed at everything, and now he’s just jealous,” she said.

A black volunteer from Boulder got up as part of a practice-your-personal-story exercise. He told the group Obama had let him down and that Trump would right the country by getting people motivated again to work for and rely on themselves.

State Rep. Cole Wist, R-Centennial, was at one of the tables before the session started. He was wearing an official name tag on his shirt identifying him as a lawmaker. He had an exotic air about him. Republican officials and party leaders have been slow to come around on Trump. They went for Ted Cruz nearly unanimously in April at the assemblies. Trump didn’t win even one pledged delegate to the national convention from the state.

“So, this is basically the Trump campaign, right?” The Statesman asked him. Wist cocked his head.

“Well, I presume he will be the party’s nominee – but I’m just here for the training, getting ready to walk my district,” he said.

The session started a few minutes late, and Wist left before it began, taking his training packet with him, waving and smiling as he headed out the door.

“We have to tell our stories,” RNC Colorado Data Director Kristian Hemphill was telling the volunteers a few minutes later. “Republicans have to get better at making emotional appeals … in order to demonstrate that we’re not just interested in people’s votes but also in their vision of the country.”

In that, the Colorado RNC staff could well have been pitching directly for Trump. Failing to make emotional appeals that motivate Americans to express themselves might have been a Romney campaign problem. It’s not a Trump campaign problem.

***This story was updated to include the jump in RNC staffers on the ground in Colorado over the last month. As reported above, State Republican Party Chairman Steve House estimated there were 12 paid staffers working the state at the end of May. That number has jumped to 30 roughly a month later, according to the state party.

– john@coloradostatesman.com