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Policy
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September 24, 2024
There is growing concern within the administration that the Trump campaign’s get-out-the-vote campaign is dangerously anemic.
Along with such enduring mysteries as “Vivek Ramaswamy: Why?” and “What exactly does RFK Jr. think he’s doing?” One of the shocking legacies of the 2024 election cycle will be the decidedly anemic performance of the Donald Trump campaign.
A fresh one gust of wind the news reports noted how tardy and tight-lipped the Trump operation has been in allocating field workers and resources to pivotal states — especially since the much better-funded and sharply focused Kamala Harris campaign is on the same battlegrounds. The Harris campaign sent 375 paid staff coordinators to the mandatory state of Pennsylvania; team Trump has somewhere between 50 and 90, according to the United Kingdom Guardian.
The disparity plays out in all battleground states as Trump’s operation hinges on get-out-the-vote efforts. right-wing super PACssuch as Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point Action and Elon Musk’s America PAC, which are relatively new to the rigors of searching and knocking on doors. Musk’s committee cashiered the company he kept to oversee door-knocking initiatives in Nevada and Arizona just seven weeks from Election Day. And the group’s outreach efforts have been notably subdued in other swing states such as Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin.
“I don’t know what PACs are doing,” Mark Forton, GOP chairman of Michigan’s Macombe County, home of the legendary swings. he told the Associated Press. “I don’t know if they go from house to house.” Nate Wilkowski, the party’s regional director for nearby Oakland County, said, citing America PAC. “No one warned me that they were in Oakland County.”
To understand how such critical campaign workers disappeared at such a pivotal moment, one must review the strategic thinking of the Trump team in the seemingly distant days when it faced off against President Joe Biden. Going back to the start of the GOP primaries, the Trump campaign focused on “low-propensity” voters, meaning Republicans who were MAGA-leaning but not reliable voters. The Iowa caucuses used an approach called “10 for Trump,” which identified 10 likely influencers on each caucus site who could push those voters toward their candidate.
That tactic led Trump to a strong 51 percent victory in Iowa — albeit on a low-turnout caucus night when temperatures dipped below 40 degrees. “Our opponents have spent tens of millions of dollars trying to get in touch with voters, to get people to knock on the door,” said Chris LaCivita, a Trump campaign associate. cheering The Atlantic Ocean. “And we spent tens of thousands printing training brochures and pretty hats with gold embroidery,” referring to the headgear worn by MAGA-anointed district captains.
When the Trump team removed the heads of the Republican National Committee in March and replaced them with their own staff, the campaign’s vision of a leaner, tightly controlled ground game became the new party orthodoxy. And the cash the RNC would save by handing GOTV operations over to super PACs run by Musk and Kirk would go toward Trump’s Ahab-like obsession with the bogus MAGA crusade of “election integrity” ie poll watchers at the polls would send and preparing for court challenges in races won by Democrats. “The marching orders were clear” Atlantic Correspondent Tim Aberta writes. “Trump’s lieutenants have had to dismantle much of the RNC’s existing ground game and devote resources to a colossal new election integrity program — an army of lawyers on arrest, hundreds of training seminars for poll watchers across the country, the goal of organizing 100,000 volunteers and designation to stand guard at polling stations, polling centers and even outside individual pitchers.”
In early June, just before Biden decided to drop out, the campaign’s plan was to microtarget support for the awkwardly yoked GOTV and “election integrity” initiatives to microtarget the unusually committed supporters the Trump team had garnered. in Iowa. It was a long-term strategy when Biden was their opponent, and now it seems even more so against the emerging Haris campaign.
At the time, LaCivita reckoned there were only four true battleground states: Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona; Nevada, North Carolina and Georgia then seemed out of reach for the Democrat. Now that that’s clearly no longer the case — LaCivita’s four select swing states are very much in play for Harris — the GOP’s targeted, poor and mean-spirited ground game strategy is causing growing concern among state and local election workers on the right. Turning Point Action and America PAC have been tasked with delivering the ground game results that have been the RNC’s strengths in the 2016 and 2020 cycles — with little sign of success thus far. The Kirk-led GOTV effort is limited to a very small slice of potential voters; PAC official he said Semaphore Reporters Shelby Talcott and Burgess Everett that it is “narrowly focused on low-propensity disengaged Republican voters — a universe of 300,000+ in Arizona, 300,000+ in Wisconsin, and then 40,000 in Michigan 7.[th district] and 30,000 in Nevada 3.”
Even with this limited mission, the group reportedly fell well short of its $108 million fundraising goal, which may explain why state and local party officials have spotted Turning Point Action candidates in the wild. Then another GOP official has a more gentle explanation: Kirk’s super PAC is “a totally shaky operation,” the Semaphore writers. Another Republican staffer focused on GOTV efforts in several states offered something similar grumpy assessment to Dispatch Policy: “Big press releases, big tweets, lots of smoke, very little work.”
Current number
Meanwhile, Musk’s America PAC operation, like all Musk endeavors, has a larger cash reserve, but is also poorly managed and focused, as the sudden turnarounds in Nevada and Arizona attest. The captain is Generra Peck and Phil Cox, who after Ron DeSantis’ epic failure in the presidential campaign – most notable for burning through $100 million in super PACs. ineffective voter mobilization systems. These high-cap, low-achievement right-wing partnerships are nothing new—Jeb Bush’s 2016 primary downfall was mobilized by millions upon millions in the ludicrously named Right to Rise super PAC.
That’s why the more traditional-minded GOP electoral hands are sounding the alarm bells loudly. “There is no tangible evidence that Trump and the RNC have invested in the kind of ground game they need in turnout elections,” said one state Republican official. he told NBC News. “Local Republicans are not being asked to knock on doors, make phone calls, text voters, or even collect mail-in ballots. Instead, they are asked to be poll watchers in Republican counties or localities with Republican officials.”
What makes such warnings especially urgent is that Trump’s surprisingly strong showing in 2020 was due in no small part to Democrats not playing along, as Biden’s party was hamstrung by Covid social distancing protocols that played no part in Republican GOTV efforts. Now that Democrats are freed from such concerns, they have done so to boost their own ground gaming operations in swing states and outspending Republicans at a clip $5 million per day. Under these circumstances, you can see why GOP operatives in swing states are frustrated at being trapped by RNC officials who tell themselves that Charlie Kirk and Elon Musk will somehow innovate out of the holes they’ve dug.
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