Where's Donald?

Donald Trump is a no-show yet again:

Nebraska is tailormade for Ted Cruz, and when the state holds its winner-take-all primary on May 10, party leaders say Trump is an all-but certain loser.

Facing those dim prospects, Trump’s best hope in the state might have been to get a few of his supporters on the list of people who will fill those delegate slots — supporters who, in later rounds of voting at a contested convention, would be inclined to abandon Cruz and help Trump.

But that’s where the billionaire appears to have missed his chance: Party officials say they saw virtually no organization by the mogul’s campaign last week when Republicans in all 93 Nebraska counties held local conventions. Those county conventions picked 800 delegates to May’s Nebraska state convention, where 33 delegates to the national convention in Cleveland will be selected.

Because there was little resistance, many county conventions became Cruz pep rallies, according to interviews with party insiders and convention attendees.

Mitt Romney lost in no small part because his ground game simply wasn’t as good as Barack Obama’s. The Democrats’ digital GOTV efforts swamped Romney’s, and the next Democratic nominee will inherit that same apparatus — new & improved for 2016.

As we saw in Colorado last weekend and now in Nebraska, Trump doesn’t have a ground game in the real world, much less in the digital one.

If he’s the nominee, he’ll be crushed.

UPDATE

I almost missed this item from Yahoo!’s Jon Ward:

If the national convention isn’t settled on the first ballot, it looks likely that many of the 50 delegates from the Palmetto State would desert Trump, who came in first in the primary, but with only 33 percent of the vote. The national convention will go to multiple ballots if Trump does not win at least 1,237 delegates out of the 2,472 available from 50 states, six U.S. territories and the District of Columbia. Currently, Trump has 743 delegates to Cruz’s 545 and 143 for Kasich.

However, South Carolina is not the only place Trump has failed to organize at the state level. He is facing delegate setbacks in Virginia, Arkansas, Colorado, Indiana, South Dakota, North Dakota, Tennessee, Louisiana, Georgia, Iowa, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Wyoming, Washington State, Missouri, and California.

There are a lot of people I respect who think Trump is the right man for the GOP nod, but I hope they can see that he just doesn’t understand how this game is played.