This is the guy who will "Make America Great Again"?

Trump's staff “got outclassed and outmaneuvered ― the Iowa team simply didn’t have the tools they needed, which is why they overpromised and underperformed,” said a source close to the Trump campaign. “The Iowa team did an amazing job with the tools that they had, but that’s like saying that Al Qaeda did an amazing job in a battle with the U.S. Army because some Al Qaeda fighters didn’t get killed.”

On the ground in Iowa last month, Trump’s operation showed signs of disorganization and acrimony as it faced mounting doubts about its ability to identify and mobilize its high numbers of previously disengaged supporters and to persuade more traditional, but undecided, Republicans to caucus for Trump.

And some Trump allies were openly expressing doubts about the largely self-funding Trump’s willingness to pay for data analytics, as well as the aptitude of the campaign’s skeletal data team back in New York headquarters. It is headed by Matt Braynard and Witold Chrabaszcz, a pair of former data engineers for the Republican National Committee who lacked high-level national campaign experience. With less than a month to go until the caucuses, sources say, Braynard was still working to assemble a team to do what he described as a combination of high-level statistical analyses and “unglamorous political grunt work.” When one experienced data engineer asked when he could start working for the Trump campaign, Braynard immediately responded: “Now.”

The campaign didn’t start seriously building a data operation to target voters until mid-October, sources said, and even then it did not act with urgency. It waited until November to begin paying a data vendor, the nonpartisan firm L2, and until late November or early December to sign an agreement allowing it to use the RNC’s massive voter file. The RNC had initially offered the arrangement back in June, and it's unclear what caused the delay in executing the agreement, but most other GOP campaigns signed similar agreements months before Trump.

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. And, in early October, Trump’s Virginia state director, Mike Rubino, reached out to the nonpartisan voter data firm rVotes, writing in an email “We want to utilize this ASAP.” Steve Adler, rVotes' owner, said the Trump campaign never followed up.

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. Trump's data outlays included $235,000 to L2 for “research consulting," $17,500 to the voter data firm NationBuilder for software, and $200,000 in list rental payments to the conservative Newsmax Media. By contrast, the Trump campaign has spent at least $1.4 million on rally-related expenses and $1.2 million on hats ― presumably mostly for the now-iconic hats bearing Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.”

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. “Trump’s a businessman,” said Joe Rospars, who served as a chief digital strategist to President Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns. “He’s not going to spend any more money than he has to, and he made his bet.”