Trump stumbles on nat'l stage

Donald Trump hasn't quite asked the dead to vote for him, but he's nearly there.

"I joke a lot as I say if you're sick, if you just got the worse prognosis that a doctor can give you, if you're lying in bed and you just know you're not going to make it -- you have to get up on November 8th and you have to vote," he said Thursday.

The Republican presidential candidate is a bit worried about his chances in November against Hillary Clinton, and he's not exactly hiding it.

And his team is struggling to transform his winning primary campaign model into an unbeatable national election machine.

During the Republican primaries, the Manhattan real estate mogul and former reality television star ignored the experts and the pundits who told him to be more "presidential," to stop insulting his rival and to prepare his speeches. To everyone's surprise, Trump's iconoclastic strategy worked.

But since officially becoming the party's standard-bearer, at the urging of his aides, he has given more policy-driven speeches using a teleprompter.

But part of him visibly chafes at the constraints, and he's quick to go off-script -- and off-message, as evidenced by some of his near-daily missteps in recent weeks: over Russia, the parents of a Muslim soldier killed in action, on guns and Hillary Clinton, and on the Islamic State group and President Barack Obama.

Winning a presidential election historically requires more than just catchy slogans. It also requires a massive communications budget.

According to ABC News, the Democrat's campaign and her main super PAC (political action committee) have spent nearly $93 million on television ads against just $11 million spent by outside groups backing Trump.

The Republican's official campaign committee has so far spent nothing on television ads -- practically unheard of in modern campaigns.

The US presidential election is an indirect one -- voters in each state technically pick a slate of party electors -- not one of the candidates -- when they cast their ballots. The winner needs a majority of the 538 votes in the Electoral College, or 270.

Experts for the specialized political newsletter Sabato's Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia are predicting that Clinton will win easily, with 347 electoral votes against 191 for Trump.

Faced with the prospect of defeat, Trump so far seems oddly detached.

"If at the end of 90 days I fall short... even though I'm supposed to have a lot of good ideas, it's OK. I go back to a very good way of life," he told CNBC.

"It's either going to work or I'm going to, you know, I'm going to have a very, very nice long vacation."