“He dumped our ass, right? He won, we lost, so let’s keep everything in perspective,” Roe told me during a 90-minute interview for POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast that quickly turned into an intense tutorial in Republican campaign strategy and management — and a warning to the man who beat his boss.

“There’s a trove of information that’s done in and around politics” that Trump needs to tap, said Roe, who credits Cruz’s big win in the Iowa caucuses to the campaign’s identification and targeting of precisely 9,181 voters who were undecided but had Cruz and Trump as their final choices.

“It’s worth, on its worst day, 2½ points, and in its best day, 5½ points,” he added. “So let’s just split the difference and say that Clinton’s running a great [operation]. … He’s not right now, so that would give her … 3½ points.”…

“I don’t know everything that he has, but I do know a couple of things,” he said. “It’s going to be very hard for him to just use the RNC. The RNC has got a very candidate-generic model. … [In Iowa,] we knew voters’ names and what they cared about and how they received their information.”