MOBILE, Alabama — Former President Donald Trump, vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, the Republican Party, and their entire political leadership team are guilty of campaign malpractice in the first degree.

Granted, running a campaign is hard work, with a ton of unpredictability and a significant amount of luck mixed in. Still, some factors are predictable, things for which plans obviously must be made, considerations that must be taken into account. Especially when time is ample, there’s no excuse for failing to be ready to handle these factors.

The GOP brain trust has failed at the biggest of these tasks so far. And even for those Trump-weary conservatives who are indifferent to the former president’s fate vs. Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, the thought of liberal Democratic victories in the House and Senate resulting from spinoff effects of this GOP incompetence, thus enabling Harris’s radicalism to have free rein, is palpably frightening.

Yet right now, Team Trump and the RNC are blowing things so badly that even once-promising congressional races are suddenly facing headwinds.

Trump’s brain trust was blessed with far, far more than the usual amount of time to prepare for this summer’s politics. The sole remaining challenger, Nikki Haley, dropped out of the nomination battle on March 6, and the race had been effectively over for weeks before that. That gave the Trump campaign well over four months to be ready for three key, utterly predictable developments and ready to meet one readily discernible challenge. The campaign failed at all four.

First, the campaign had more than four months to vet and choose a vice presidential nominee and to plan for how to counter any weaknesses easily accessible via social media. Second, it was patently obvious that there was a strong possibility, even a likelihood, that President Joe Biden would be replaced on the Democratic ticket. Third, if a Biden withdrawal occurred, the odds-on favorite, even if not absolutely sure thing, to be his replacement was Vice President Kamala Harris.

Finally, the overwhelmingly apparent challenge was that while Trump has an avid set of base voters, he is unusually unpopular outside of his base, with a special weakness among traditional suburbanites once described as “Yuppies,” who in non-Trump years lean Republican. Despite their aversion to Trump, they were persuadable away from Biden because he has governed as a leftist while scaring people with his obvious physical and mental decline.

It takes no genius to figure out that the best way to attract disaffected soccer moms and dads, and thus to finally exceed Trump’s 47% national vote ceiling, was to choose a vice president who could reassure them that the post-Trump party would be more stable, more experienced, less extremely MAGA-ish. The second best way was to run a convention that attracts, rather than repels, people not already on the MAGA bus.

Instead, the campaign played entirely to the already-solid MAGA base in both its awful choice of Vance, already measured as the least popular selection in polling history, as Trump’s running mate, and in a convention appalling in its lack of anything approaching decorum. I’m in Alabama, about as Trump-friendly a milieu as anywhere in the country, but again and again after the convention, I heard from people turned off by the spectacle of fake wrestlers tearing off their shirts; Satanist-complimenting, abortion-promoting, vulgar-lyrics-singing former strippers having prime speaking slots; and by the candidate’s future daughter-in-law shrieking from the podium while yelling that D-Day was a battle against communists. And then Trump himself rambled through the longest convention speech in history while bragging how popular he is with authoritarian and totalitarian dictators.

Then there’s Vance. At the very least, a campaign with four months to vet running mates should have responses ready to attacks on his social media embarrassments. Instead, the Trump campaign has been entirely helpless in explaining Vance’s repeated criticisms of childless adults, while Vance amazingly kept repeating them even after the earlier comments proved extremely unpopular. Vance hasn’t even walked back his 2021 suggestion that parents should get not just lower tax rates but actually more votes than non-parents.

How does a campaign let that happen? And how, once Trump himself opened a monumentally racial attack on Harris’s ancestry, does a campaign spend days echoing and celebrating the attack? Not only is this politically stupid, but it’s also morally reprehensible. So much so that it has pushed to the background Trump’s also-reprehensible promise to pardon even those Capitol rioters already convicted not just for trespassing but specifically for beating up police.

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign clearly was caught off guard by Biden’s withdrawal from the race. Even though rumors began at least as early as a year ago that Biden would be replaced, and although it became obvious after this summer’s debate that most of the party’s leaders were working to oust him, Team Trump had no cogent Plan B ready to go. So, so, so much ammunition is available to fire at Harris’s extremist record, yet even 12 days after Biden’s withdrawal, the Trump campaign hasn’t found a single way effectively to sully Harris’s sudden political honeymoon that has her 5 points ahead of Trump even in the ordinarily Republican-friendly Rasmussen survey.

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Republicans can reverse the tide in two ways. First, put the same muzzle on Trump that seemed to be there in late spring and early summer when he stayed mostly silent, rather than spewing crazy insults and racial inanities, while Democrats stumbled. Second, and this one will be really difficult, find some deft way, some plausible excuse, to ease Vance off the ticket and replace him with somebody more of Team Normal, such as Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA).

Actually, polls suggest that replacing Trump himself would do even more good, but that’s well-nigh impossible. What isn’t impossible is for a campaign to actually try to appeal to people not already on the Trump train while breathing their own fumes.