Manforté

In the hopes of staving off the GOP establishment’s efforts to block his nomination at a contested convention, GOP frontrunner Donald Trump hired a new delegate manager who has successfully led similar convention battles over the past several decades.

Trump has hired delegate manager Paul Manafort to lead his GOP convention efforts and shore up enough delegates to ensure he wins the nomination on the first ballot at the GOP presidential convention in Cleveland in July. Manafort is well known in GOP circles because in 1976, on behalf of then President Gerald Ford—who ascended to the presidency without being elected because of Richard Nixon’s Watergate-driven resignation—Manafort successfully fended off future president Ronald Reagan in a delegate battle that may end up looking a lot like 2016. Thanks to Manafort’s work for Ford that year, the incumbent president barely held on to the party’s nomination, beating back Reagan’s challenge.

But four years later, when Reagan faced a similar but less complicated delegate battle in 1980, he hired Manafort to lead his successful delegate fight at the convention that year.

Donald Trump’s campaign is preparing a sophisticated operation to fight back against resurgent plans by recalcitrant conservatives to deny him the nomination at next month’s Republican National Convention.

In a high-level Tuesday night conference call led partly by Trump’s top adviser Paul Manafort and including 200 staffers and volunteers, Trump’s senior convention aides sketched out a whip operation led by a half-dozen operatives with deep convention experience. The effort will rely on a team of 150 volunteers and paid staff to keep the convention’s 2,472 delegates in line, and it will utilize a database with information on many of the delegates.

The plans laid out during the call suggest that Trump’s campaign is working to reverse a narrative that it has lacked organization, and the planning also indicates that Trump’s aides are taking seriously efforts by his GOP opponents to out-maneuver him on the convention floor.

The campaign is planning to reveal an additional eight “regional whip” leaders in the coming days, sources familiar with the operation said. Each will oversee seven of the 56 states and territories sending delegations to Cleveland.