Member Newsletter
We have a nice addition to the emerging library of reporting on Republican ground operations from Ryan Cooper at The American Prospect. Cooper actually lives in one of the swingiest parts of Pennsylvania. So he’s not only a very sharp political reporter and commentator, he’s there on the ground as a recipient of the door-knocking and mailering and all the rest — both lab-coated scientist and guinea pig, as it were. So it’s a unique view. The gist matches what I’ve come up with. There just doesn’t seem to be much if any GOP ground operation in the sense of door knocking, dropping off pamphlets or much of anything else. There’s a slew of mailers. And there you’ve got the other issue I’ve been obsessed by: Cooper is a left-leaning Democrat who I’d assume has seldom or ever voted for a Republican. So why is his mailbox bursting with GOP mailers?
We’ve still got this wildcard of the outside-the-box effort to drive seldom or never-voting Trumpers to the ballot box, something the campaign claims just isn’t visible in the way standard door-knocking is. We can’t rule that out. The process they describe would be much less visible. But there are at least a lot of good questions about whether that’s happening, how effective it would be and perhaps more than anything else — regardless of those first two questions — why you’d drop the standard stuff regardless. This is the part no one on the GOP side has ever credibly answered. Even if the non-voting Trumper mobilization effort really is the silver bullet, why on earth would you stop doing the standard stuff? Makes no sense. The real answer, which I noted in my piece on this a few days ago and which I arrived at thanks largely to Tim Alberta’s Atlantic article back in July, is that they just didn’t have the cash to do it. Trump had spent the money on legal fees and “ballot security.” So his campaign tried to make the best of a bad situation by handing it off to Charlie Kirk and hoping for the best.
It didn’t pan out. In fact, Kirk’s operation crashed and burned so badly that Musk had to be pulled in in stages to rescue the operation.
Where we’re left, I think, is that Elon Musk is running and funding a national Get Out the Vote operation, and it looks to be a pretty big bust — at least judged by the standard of fielding an effort comparable to what the RNC and Republican infrastructure generally did in the past and could have been expected to do with adequate funding in this cycle.
That doesn’t mean that no doors are being knocked. And it certainly doesn’t mean Trump will lose because of it. We have to remember that an energized political coalition or party will mostly turn itself out. And at least some GOTV can be overkill: what’s the return on the tenth hyped-up Democratic activist knocking on the door of a beleaguered voter in some critical swing town in Pennsylvania. But with all those caveats, on the basic, threshold question, I don’t think there can be much debate. Conventional GOTV — door-knocking and person-to-person contact — is a highly visible exercise. And in most key areas observers just aren’t seeing it. In many or most cases they’re seeing nothing. In others it’s dwarfed by what Democrats and liberal groups are doing. There’s just no denying this.
There’s a good chance the now 50-50 polls will be followed by an electoral result that swings two or three points in one direction or another. In that case it might not matter. But in a super tight race in the swing states it really could make a difference.