A good ground game is worth around three points in the final election results, making it an indispensable component of any winning campaign in a tight contest. Democrats are running their usual operation, which has served the party well in the last few cycles. Republicans? It is impossible to get a completely accurate census of what’s going on on the Republican side, but the signs aren’t looking so good for them. Let’s read some tea leaves. Big picture strategy “Ms. Harris’s team is running an expansive version of the type of field operation that has dominated politics for decades, deploying flotillas of paid staff members to organize and turn out every vote they can find,” reported the New York Times. “Mr. Trump’s campaign is going after a smaller universe of less frequent voters while relying on well-funded but inexperienced outside groups to reach a broader swath.” Democrats are deploying their trusted battle-tested GOTV operation, while Republicans are relying on “inexperienced” groups. I’ll take the side that already knows what it’s doing. But it’s even worse than that for Trump. “Mr. Trump’s team is largely operating under the assumption that Republicans who voted for Trump in previous elections will once again back him in large numbers,” reported the Times. “His campaign is focusing on a smaller number of infrequent voters who his team believes will back Mr. Trump if energized to vote. The campaign says it has “hundreds of paid staff” and over 300 offices across the battleground states.” First of all, assuming past supporters will turn out is perhaps the dumbest political assumption anyone can make. Remember Trump raised $88 million less this past September than in September 2020. There is objectively less intensity around Trump’s supporter base today than four years ago. They should be working hard to shore up any flagging support, instead of just taking them for granted. For context, Harris claims over 2,500 paid staff over 353 offices, exponentially more than Trump’s claims of “hundreds.” Early results Over the weekend, I noted signs of a GOTV operation in the early vote. “Nationally, Democrats and unaffiliated voters modeled to be voting Democratic are 55.8% of the early vote,” I wrote. “But in battleground states, that number is 58.9%. I’ve written multiple times how a good get-out-the-vote operation can be worth around 3 points, and there you have it, literally 3 points. It suggests what we’ve seen and heard the last several months—that Republican complaints about a lack of a Trump ground game are true.” Republican early vote woes “Republicans are pouring tens of millions of dollars into getting GOP voters to cast ballots before Election Day,” Politico reported last week. “They’re frustrated because Donald Trump keeps getting in the way.” The rest of the story features examples of the effort Republicans are putting into the early vote, only to, well, get the results I noted above. Republican GOTV woes A month ago I wrote about the dearth of any Trump get out the vote operation. Remember, the first thing Trump did upon taking over the Republican National Committee was fire the GOP’s entire ground operation. Donald Trump shakes hands with Charlie Kirk. Originally, Charlie Kirk and his Turning Point USA operation were supposed to handle all of Trump’s GOTV. Kirk boasted about the $100 million he was raising for those efforts. “Turning Point activists will descend on three vital swing states—Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin,” The Guardian reported back in June. “They will also fan out over six battleground states: Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania. ‘We are hiring hundreds of ballot chasers to work as full-time activists in the cities in which they live, and we believe we will absolutely have the most boots on the ground,’ TP Action’s spokesperson, Andrew Kolvet, told the Guardian.” By last week, those efforts had been dramatically scaled back. “After announcing ambitious goals to grow Trump’s base of support in Arizona, Wisconsin and Michigan, the group scaled back its efforts to one district in the Wolverine State while maintaining its presence in the other two battleground states,” reported CNN last week. The Guardian pegged their presence as even smaller: “Turning Point Action ... has a smaller footprint; it has a presence in Arizona, Wisconsin and two specific districts in Michigan and Nevada, after dropping Georgia from its initial list.” To pick up the slack, Republicans are relying on that noted expert in voter turnout operations, Elon Musk. “But while the Trump campaign once predicted having multiple Pacs doing get-out-the-vote work, with six weeks until the election, only America Pac has a material presence of 300 to 400 paid and part-time people knocking on doors in each of the seven battleground states, the people said,” further reported The Guardian. “America Pac also remains the only entity—Trump campaign or otherwise—with a target to do three ‘passes’ of homes of likely Trump voters in every battleground state before election day.” A month ago, Musk’s America PAC fired its Nevada and Arizona GOTV canvassers, having to start from scratch just months from the election. This is not an operation that is firing on all cylinders, or even knows what cylinders to fire. Elon Musk is Elon Musk Elon Musk jumps on the stage as Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at the Butler Farm Show, Saturday, Oct. 5, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania. The NY Times, in a far-ranging story on Musk’s efforts, notes how Musk’s style of manic chaos has enveloped America PAC. “Veterans of past campaigns argue that canvassing operations generally take months or even years to become effective machines,” reported the Times. “There is little precedent for successfully standing up a group of this scale just months before a presidential election. And turmoil has plagued America PAC at times, as Mr. Musk has repeatedly jettisoned advisers and vendors that were supplying canvassers and replaced them, at one point stranding hundreds of paid door-knockers across the country.” The story also quoted an anonymous “Trump campaign official” claiming that they were not “relying” on America PAC. But if not them … then who? Republican GOTV app sucks “Donald Trump’s campaign has limited ability to know whether their ground game operation is reaching target voters in battleground states, as the software being used needs fast internet service to properly track canvassers, according to multiple people familiar with the situation,” reported The Guardian on Monday. “But the Trump campaign and the Elon Musk-backed America Pac, which is now doing an outsized portion of the Trump ground game, use a management app called Campaign Sidekick that struggles in areas with slow internet and means canvassers have to use an offline version.” Also, the broken app creates this problem: “[T]he Trump campaign and America Pac then have little way to know whether canvassers are actually knocking on doors or whether they are cheating—for instance, by ‘speed-running’ routes where they literally throw campaign materials at doors as they drive past.” Oh, there’s lots of “speed-running” going on. Republicans are terrible people who even hate each other By leaving GOTV to other people, the Trump campaign has essentially left their ground game to their worst local leaders. “The divisions are open, acrimonious and may be hindering efforts to register voters and get out the vote for Mr. Trump, who won this key swing county [in northwest Pennsylvania] in 2016 but lost it to President Biden in 2020,” reported the NY Times. The infighting, according to interviews with multiple people involved, is a byproduct of the Trump campaign’s decision to largely leave its ground game not only to local Republican Party offices but also to a variety of outside groups, all with their own methodologies and demands for attention. Tom Eddy, the Erie County Republican Party chairman, appears to be at war with a core group of Republican activists who have styled themselves as the mainstay of the party’s ground game in the county. Mr. Eddy calls those activists self-promoters and cranks. That story then notes that at the local Trump campaign, the three paid staff staffers thought all those other jokers were useless, calling themselves, “the real muscle behind the Republican ground game in the county.” Republicans are outgunned Those three Erie Trump staffers admitted that Democrats had 11 paid staffers in the county and were “outgunned” by them. And it’s clear they were. While the Trump staffers said they had “some volunteers” working with them, Democrats had 190 volunteers showing up on a Saturday to canvas the county. The NY Times also checked in on Kenosha, Wisconsin. The suburban county south of Milwaukee went Trump 51-48 in 2020, making it a key battleground in one of the most battleground-y states. It was 47-47 in 2016. So what are the campaigns up to? “Republicans have knocked on at least 3,000 doors of potential voters, and they expect to ramp up efforts in the final weeks, according to [local Republican Party chair Sandy] Wiedmeyer, who said she did not know of efforts by Turning Point Action and America PAC, which recently combined their operations in the state, in her area,” the NY Times reported. “By comparison, since Ms. Harris has been the Democratic nominee, Democrats have knocked on 25,000 doors in the county, according to a Democratic Party spokesman.” There were 89,000 votes cast in the county in 2020. It’s not all doom and gloom for Republicans Republicans have the experienced Faith and Freedom Coalition turning out the evangelical vote. Those people vote, and they vote in large numbers. And they don’t need to rely on Musk or Kirk or anyone else to do what they already do very well. And however clumsily or inefficiently they may be doing it, Musk’s tens (or hundreds) of million of dollars will have an impact. It might not be as effective as Democratic efforts, but it doesn’t need to be. That means that we need to commit to helping drive our own voter turnout.
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