Accusing Cruz of stealing votes helps Trump preserve some dignity in defeat. He has run on a platform of promising to win so much that America actually gets sick of winning. Rather than admit that he lost fair and square in Iowa on Monday, Trump can now claim that the system was rigged. That will allow him to deflect criticism that he is in fact a loser. The attack is also guaranteed to tap into the vein of voter resentment that has so far fueled Trump’s rise. It feeds a narrative that Trump is an outsider fighting against political corruption, a story that Trump loyalists love to tell.
.. There’s a reason conspiracy theories resonate with voters. “It’s a way to explain a complicated event in a way that helps people maintain their worldview and protect their own self-esteem in some regard,”
.. Political psychology also helps explain why Trump’s voter-fraud accusations could be particularly powerful for people who already support him. “For people who threw their weight behind Trump in Iowa only to see him lose, how do you explain that?”’
.. The easier thing for people to do, whether you call it a rationalization, a scapegoat, or a conspiracy, is to find a way to explain why their candidate lost in a way that helps them maintain the belief that they’re right.
How Wounded Are Trump and Clinton?
A wounded Trump could turn out to be worse than a winning Trump. He has the means to stay in the race, he’ll still be on stage at debates dogging the other candidates, and he has the ego to simply not go away.
How Trump let himself get out-organized
For months, Donald Trump’s allies urged him to invest in the technology necessary to identify and mobilize his supporters, sources close to Trump’s campaign told POLITICO, but the billionaire barely budged, apparently believing his star power would provide a new way to mobilize voters.
By the time his campaign began investing in voter data and targeting analytics, his rivals for the GOP nomination — particularly Iowa winner Ted Cruz and third-place finisher Marco Rubio — had spent millions building sophisticated voter-targeting machines.
.. At one point early in the campaign, Trump representatives talked to Cambridge Analytica ― the firm now being credited with engineering Cruz’s cutting-edge targeting operation ― about retaining the company’s services, but they decided it was too expensive.
..Through the end of last year, the period covered by the most recent Federal Election Commission filings, Trump’s campaign had spent only about $560,000 on data-related costs, compared with at least $3.6 million for Cruz.
.. The campaign’s lackadaisical data effort is seen in some quarters as coming down to Trump’s lack of willingness to use his own cash on something that’s seen as essential in modern-day presidential politics.
.. “We didn’t have much of a ground game because I didn’t think I was going to be winning and you know, etc. etc.,” he said. “That’s why I’m so honored to have come in second.”
.. The company, which is owned by one of Cruz’s biggest donors, worked with both the campaign and a network of linked super PACs to identify Cruz supporters and persuadable voters using what it called “psychographic” profiles culled from social media, and commercial and political data.
.. The team divided the undecided voters ― who were heavily evangelical and 91 percent male ― into more than 150 different subgroups based off ideology, religion and personality type, Wilson said. It used Facebook experiments to determine which issues jazzed up their voters the most.
The Five Stages of Donald Trump’s Grief Over His Loss in Iowa
Following his inability to win as many votes as Mr. Cruz, Mr. Trump admitted that more focus should have been put on his ground game. But rather than taking personal responsibility, Mr. Trump said he would have invested more if he knew there was a problem.
“I think, in retrospect, we should have had a better ground game,” Mr. Trump said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “I would have funded a better ground game, but people told me our ground game was fine.”