Opinion: Is Trump smart to ignore conventional political wisdom?

You have to hand it to Donald Trump — he’s committed to breaking the mold for a presidential campaign. Which invites the question of why there’s a mold to begin with.

Trump revealed this week that he’s expanding his leadership team, which is not an unusual step for someone whose campaign has hit a rough patch. What was unusual was where Trump went looking for help.

Rather than bringing on veterans of successful presidential campaigns (or even successful campaigns for Senate or governor in a large state), he tapped the head of a combative conservative news site — Stephen K. Bannon, chief executive of Breitbart News — and a Republican pollster for his former rival Ted Cruz, Kellyanne Conway. Bannon will be the campaign’s top official and Conway its manager, focusing on the message it delivers and how it’s delivered.

According to the Washington Post, the two hires show that Trump is determined to be Trump — an anti-establishment figure who does things his way. Many pundits have noted Trump’s, err, idiosyncratic approach to stump speeches. Yet at least as important is his idiosyncratic approach to the nuts and bolts of getting elected, whether it be creating campaign organizations in must-win states, spreading his message through TV commercials or using data to target get-out-the-vote efforts. Evidently, Trump’s efforts in these areas have either been late or nonexistent.

If you were trying to shore up the campaign’s blocking and tackling, you wouldn’t hire someone with no experience in a presidential race — or any other major race. Yet that’s Bannon, a former Wall Street banker turned journalistic provocateur.

Perhaps Bannon, who is supposed to “bolster the business-like approach” of the Trump campaign, will help keep the candidate focused on attacking Hillary Clinton, rather than spiraling off into argumentative cul-de-sacs with her supporters, his critics or other peripheral figures. That, after all, is the sort of messaging “discipline” that the GOP establishment has been lighting candles for ever since Trump became the party’s presumptive nominee.

But how important would that be, really? Trump’s penchant for off-the-cuff remarks and ambiguously incendiary assertions (see, for example, his comment about “2^nd Amendment people” finding a way to stop Hillary Clinton from appointing liberal judges) has been a key part of his appeal. Much of his audience is drawn to him precisely because he doesn’t stick to a script. They want a brawler, not someone who promises a Kumbaya presidency.

Similarly, conventional wisdom holds that candidates need to blanket the airwaves with ads to rebut their opponents’ attacks and launch some of their own, if for no other reason than to force rivals to spend money on defense. But Trump all but ignored this tenet during the primaries because he was so adept at getting on the air for free. He was so controversial, the news media couldn’t afford not to cover him.

Still, there are some chapters of the conventional campaign playbook that seem dangerous not to follow. In particular, history seems to have proved that candidates win when they do a better job identifying their supporters and getting them to the polls. In years past, that’s been a labor-intensive job; even when your organization is adept at crunching voter data, it still takes a lot of people to make contact with individual voters and make sure they follow through. That’s why large-scale campaigns have been so reliant on their party organizations, which have a large base of volunteers on which to draw. Failing that, they have to raise a boatload of cash and build large grass-roots teams of their own.

Trump’s relationship with the Republican Party machinery has been iffy at best. And as Trump has slid in the polls, scores of GOP officeholders have urged the party to shift dollars from his campaign to theirs. But in the wake of these rumblings, Trump brought in Bannon, a guy whose hostility toward some top congressional Republicans won’t exactly shore up Trump’s standing in the party.

Yes, Trump is indeed breaking the mold. But can he win that way?

jon.healey@latimes.com

Twitter: @jcahealey