They waited to annnounce it until their candidate was in Colombia talking trade agreements and the drug war, but John McCain’s campaign said today that campaign manager Rick Davis, who has been with McCain since at least 2000, will relinquish day-to-day operations to senior adviser Steve Schmidt. CNN reports that Schmidt will report to Davis, but everyone else—from message and communications to political structure to organization and scheduling—will report to Schmidt.

From CNN’s Political Ticker:

Schmidt’s top priority, according to a senior aide, will be to stop “errors in the campaign.” He is also expected to shore up what some believe is a misguided political operation put in place by Davis – a decentralized system of regional campaign managers who are not given clear instructions from the central campaign.

The move was made, CNN said, “in the wake of growing Republican concern about its ability to compete against Barack Obama.“

CNN doesn’t elaborate on that “growing Republican concern.“ But it probably has more than a little to do with numbers like those I told you about in the previous post.