I have written before about how important the so-called ‘ground game’ is in US elections. This is the name given to the efforts by candidates to get voters to actually vote for them. By themselves, such ‘get out the vote’ (GOTV) efforts may only contribute marginally to the final vote tallies but in close races, as the current one between Kamala Harris and creepy Donald Trump is, they can prove to be the decisive factor by boosting turnout.

Traditionally these efforts operate under the umbrella of the national parties that coordinate with state and local branches, since that provides an ongoing organizational structure and institutional memory that can be called upon in each election cycle. The national party organization provides funding to supplement whatever is raised by the candidates, and this money goes to hire staff members at all levels, down to the precincts. But the bulk of the actual work, consisting of making phone calls to voters, sending out mailers and postcards, distributing yard signs and flyers, and most importantly, going door-to-door and talking to people, is done by volunteers and these volunteers play a crucial role.

This year, however, the campaign of creepy Trump has chosen to go a different route, greatly reducing the role of the Republican National Committee. This is a bit surprising since creepy Trump engineered the ouster of the head of the RNC Ronna Romney McDaniel (daughter of Mitt Romney) and installed his daughter-in-law Lara Trump as co-chair. I thought that having such an ardent cult member at the helm signaled an even more active role for the RNC but the opposite happened. The campaign seemed to have outsourced the GOTV efforts at the local level to outside groups, and focused mainly on rallies and TV advertisement to reach voters.

By many accounts, that is not going well. First the GOTV campaign was given to the group Turning Point Action that had no prior experience doing this kind of work and when that faltered, to Elon Musk’s America PAC which also has no experience.

Josh Marshall provides a detailed analysis of how this came about.

We’ve spoken a number of times about the Republican ground game, or Get Out The Vote efforts. Just to review again, the Trump campaign made the decision to take GOTV operations away from the RNC and outsource it to a series of pro-Trump super PACs. The question now is: did the gamble pay off? Have the super PACs been able to field a solid ground operation or perhaps create one even better than the one the RNC would have created?
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The best reporting suggests that this whole idea started with Charlie Kirk at Turning Point USA and the group’s campaign wing, Turning Point Action. Kirk had this idea that he wanted his group to take over GOTV and he was pitching a $100 million plan for doing it to GOP billionaires. That’s how the fuse got lit on Ronna McDaniel’s tenure at the RNC. He started basically a campaign against her, that she was standing in the way of the kind of ground operation that could propel Trump to victory, etc. Certainly there were other factors that played into McDaniel losing her job and Trump installing his daughter-in-law. Indeed, Tim Alberta’s piece from July does a good job of explaining how two things came together. Kirk succeeded in making the case within Trumpworld and McDaniel was a kind of fuddy-duddy RINO who had to go. But Trump’s campaign bosses also realized that they were not going to have the money to run a robust field operation. So they married up their budget realities with Kirk’s crusade.
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But as of today, Turning Point is only operating in Arizona, the state it’s based in. Their operation had already been scaled back dramatically to only operating in Wisconsin and Arizona. And then a couple weeks ago they handed what remained of their Wisconsin operation to Musk’s America PAC.
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I’m explaining this backstory because I don’t think it’s gotten enough attention and it’s important context for what now seems to be the ramshackle and at best low energy ground operation. The dig on Kirk’s whole idea in and outside the GOP back in early 2024 was that Turning Point had zero experience in doing GOTV work and no organizational ability to manage a $100 million operation across half a dozen states. And those points turned out to be right. So there seems to have been a months-long triage in which as Turning Point Action’s efforts faltered, Musk’s America PAC was in stages pulled in to take over. Because, remember, they’d already canned everyone who did this stuff at the RNC. And the campaign didn’t have the money for it. So Musk picked up the shortfall.

What Musk has is a lot of money that he is willing to throw in to support creepy Trump, and he has used his American PAC to pay people to do the work that is traditionally done by volunteers. That is proving to have mixed results, because people who are paid typically do not have the passion and enthusiasm that volunteers bring and thus may do a slipshod job. Some Republicans are sounding the alarm about a faltering GOTV effort. Some paid workers have found ways to hack the app that is supposed to show that they actually knocked on doors, so that they are just going through the motions just to get the money.

Donald Trump’s campaign may be failing to reach thousands of voters they hope to turn out in Arizona and Nevada, with roughly a quarter of door-knocks done by America Pac flagged by its canvassing app as potentially fraudulent, according to leaked data and people familiar with the matter.

The potentially fake door-knocks – when canvassers falsely claim to have visited a home – could present a serious setback for Trump as he and Kamala Harris remain even in the polls with fewer than 20 days until an election.

The Trump campaign earlier this year outsourced the bulk of its ground game to America Pac, the political action committee founded by Elon Musk, betting that spending millions to turn out Trump supporters, especially those who don’t typically vote, would boost returns.

But leaked America Pac data obtained by the Guardian shows that roughly 24% of the door-knocks in Arizona and 25% of the door-knocks in Nevada this week were flagged under its internal “unusual survey logs”, a metric used to determine faked doors.
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Part of the problem with paid canvassing, in general, is that canvassing vendors are disincentivized to fire canvassers the more doors they hit because the vendors are paid by the door. If the doors are not hit, the vendor owes money back to the client or owes that many “free” doors.

For America Pac, there is further disincentive for vendors to fire canvassers who might only be frauding one door out of every 10 – effectively someone who just cuts corners – because the labor supply of canvassers is diminished this late in the cycle and hiring a replacement is increasingly difficult, two people familiar with the situation said.

Ryan Cooper lives in Pennsylvania, a swing state, in a swing region within the state and he reports that unlike in previous elections, he has not seen many signs of support for creepy Trump.

[A]s I’ve walked and driven around town, it’s clear that Wilkes-Barre is simply crawling with liberal canvassers, who can be identified by their Harris-Walz merch, particularly the amusing camouflage hats. Even Christine Baranski, the Emmy Award-winning actress from The Good Wife and The Gilded Age, is knocking on doors in Wilkes-Barre, apparently to get out the Polish American vote (which is plentiful!).

But I have not seen a single Trump canvasser anywhere. The only conservative activist I’ve seen was what appeared to be a middle-school age kid in a Trump costume sitting in the road median near a beer store waving some flags…

Local friends inform me that this was not the case in 2020 or 2016. Sean Cole, a volunteer working the desk at the Luzerne County Democratic Party office, told me that, despite the pandemic throwing a wrench into voter contact, there were plenty of Republican canvassers around that year. “This time, they’re having to pay people,” he said. “All our people are volunteers, and we’ve got people from as far away as Colorado.”

The creepy Trump campaign explains away this lack of visible support by saying that they are doing something new, seeking out just the low-propensity voters because the rest of their support is locked in. Maybe so.

All these reports should be treated with caution. As should always be remembered, GOTV efforts can only boost voter turnouts by a percentage point or two, significant only in close elections. We know that many supporters of creepy Trump tend to hide their sympathies because their family and friends despise him, so there could be latent support that is not seen in the lack of a public presence. Also at this late stage, partisans for each side seize upon anecdotal evidence to boost morale among their supporters. There have been many elections in the past where I have been misled by the size and enthusiasm of crowds at rallies, the number of yard signs, and the endorsement of celebrities and political figures. So while these things seem to favor Harris, I am wary of placing too much stock in such things.