Is Donald Trump still a winner? His decisive defeat in Wisconsin is raising that question. Trump should have done well in a purple state with few of the evangelical voters who are Ted Cruz’s core constituency. Trump’s Wisconsin debacle is raising questions about how he will compete in Indiana, Pennsylvania, and California — even as John Kasich fades into irrelevance, and Ted Cruz’s world-class “ground game” is making a powerful impact.

Cruz long ago assembled a team of highly qualified loyalists, professionals who understand the GOP nomination process in depth. Those folks have been quietly working to select pro-Cruz delegates wherever party rules (which Trump’s team never mastered) will allow it; reaching out systematically to uncommitted delegates, Rubio delegates and even Trump delegates; and building bridges to a Cruz victory on a second or third ballot — a possibility that Cruz’s decisive, double digit victory in Wisconsin may have transformed into a probability.

What’s becoming increasingly clear is that Cruz is simply better organized than Trump, and not just by a little bit. Apart from the obvious negatives Donald Trump voters have winked at and even savored for months — his harsh rhetoric, his penchant for personal attacks, his blasé willingness to flip-flop, pander and fabricate to a degree that would make even many beltway political hacks blush — pundits are now pointing out some attributes that no Trump supporter could spin perversely as a strength: Trump’s impatience with the details of practical management, his carelessness in hiring senior staff, and his rich-kid peevishness when faced with obstacles or setbacks.

How will those characteristics play out if he ever does find himself in charge of a stunningly complex federal bureaucracy? It’s a question that has more and more people worrying, though some of those concerns are mitigated by the fact that there is growing evidence that Trump’s lack of organization and discipline may well keep him from ever winning his way to the White House.

Maggie Gallagher of the American Principles Project distilled Trump’s central management weakness unceremoniously:

Trump is a cheap SOB who preferred to run on free media rather than build an org. to win. Its his business model https://t.co/JSl4oig2tn

— Maggie Gallagher (@MaggieGallaghe) April 7, 2016

Leon Wolf of RedState agrees, suggesting that no one should be surprised who understands

Trump’s business model since the 80s. The main thing Trump has done, for years, is to make money by licensing his name to slap on a product, which he then promotes relentlessly while leaving the actual operation of the companies to other people (who are usually incompetent). When the whole thing comes crashing down, he walks away mostly unscathed and says, ‘All I did was license my name.’

Cruz, meanwhile, has shown a level of ruthlessness and cunning that is indicative of a person who has spent his life actually thinking through a game plan and planning for victory.

Jennifer Rubin, of The Washington Post, observes:

Cruz’s success was not easy to predict, but Trump’s failure surely was. For one thing, his business record is not nearly as successful as he would paint it, as a string of business failures and multiple company bankruptcies attest. Second, as head of a privately held firm, Trump has never had to manage under the discipline imposed by shareholders, a board of directors and government regulators who hem in chief executives of public companies. He could do and has done whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted without having to account for his failures. (Inheriting a bucket-load of money also helped, of course.) All of that — plus a narcissistic personality and lack of knowledge of much of anything beyond his own businesses — meant that it was only a matter of time before Trump hit a wall.

That next wall might come in Colorado, a state contest where Trump’s lack of preparation is clear, as MSNBC notes:

There’s a recurring question among the Republicans gathering in Colorado at state and local conventions to choose delegates this week: “Where’s Donald Trump?”

Colorado is a rare state where party officials choose delegates without any input from a primary or caucus vote. The bulk of the state’s 37 delegates will be picked at a series of congressional district conventions on Friday and a state convention on Saturday in Colorado Springs. Prospective delegates can run as unaffiliated free agents or pledge to back a candidate.

“There just doesn’t seem to be any Trump organization at all, to be honest,” Dick Wadhams, a former Colorado GOP chairman, told MSNBC.

Colorado is not an outlier, according to the Washington Examiner, which reports:

A former senior adviser to Donald Trump claims the Republican presidential front-runner has virtually no campaign infrastructure in the primary states that lie ahead

Roger Stone, who left the Trump campaign last August, said Wednesday on Breitbart News radio that the billionaire should consider his landslide loss in Wisconsin a warning to his campaign that it needs to be better organized in states like Pennsylvania, Maryland and Indiana, which are set to hold their nominating contests between now and early May.

….

According to the Trump loyalist, the same woman who ran Trump’s campaign operation in Wisconsin “previously ran Oklahoma for Trump” and had zero experience running any type of political campaign.

RedState’s Leon Wolf concludes, based on reports such as these, that the contrast between the two GOP frontrunners “ought to make everyone who is still hesitant about Cruz as a nominee feel better about the prospects of Cruz both as a general election candidate and as a potential President.”

Wolf continues:

Sure, Cruz might not be as polished on TV as Rubio was, and me might not be a great ideological fit for the country, but y0u can be guaranteed that his campaign will ruthlessly squeeze every possible vote out of the country at large. As President, you can know that he will minimize rookie mistakes and always have a Plan B (and probably C, D, and E) for in case things go wrong.

Trump has shown no capacity to do either. And that’s why he’s not going to reach 1,237, and why he would unquestionably be a worse candidate (AND a worse President) than Cruz would be.

Perhaps in response to criticisms like these, today the Trump campaign announced the hiring of seasoned political operative Paul Manafort as its Convention Manager. Manafort has extensive experience in U.S. elections, but has attracted controversy for his willingness to work with ousted Vladimir Putin ally and former Ukrainian leader Viktor Yanukovych.