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?
As you know, I’ve been looking at this question from a bunch of different angles and trying to make sense of fairly anecdotal data. But over the last few days, from a mix of public reporting and private conversations, I’ve become convinced that there’s a major drop off for Republicans in ground operations. I think all the red flags and smoke were about something real. People on the ground who are in a position to see what’s there just aren’t seeing a major effort. Meanwhile, we’re seeing lots of reporting on the kinds of failures you’d expect to see with a hastily thrown together effort made up almost entirely of paid canvassers. There appears to be high rates of fraud, people doing canvassing who actually don’t care who wins the presidency, major shortfalls in goals. We’ve seen this in reports from NBC, Reuters and The Guardian in addition to other publications.
I want to stress that Republicans’ field operations being a bust by no means tells us that Harris will win the presidency or that Trump’s going to lose. It could make the difference. But as we’ve noted, a ground operation maybe gets you a point or two extra. If one campaign is organically moving toward a solid victory, field operations aren’t going to matter. It’s the kind of thing that makes a difference in a really close race. So yes, it’s important. But it only matters to the result in a certain set of circumstances — really, a very close final result.
There’s one point I want to focus on a bit that hasn’t gotten a lot of attention. 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.
The point here is that this whole idea starts with Kirk. And the idea isn’t that super PACs are going to take on the job. It’s that Turning Point Action is going to do it, along with some other groups. They’re going to be operating in at least four swing states and quite possibly all of them.
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.
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.
This is all the context for what we’re seeing now. None of this is the product of any plan. It’s the residue of Kirk’s boastful pitch to take over Republican ground operations, a pitch that fell apart because of a mix of fundraising shortfalls, insufficient organizational and managerial capacity and more. Musk came in to fill the breach because he has limitless money. But they’ve tried to do it almost entirely with contractors and paid doorknockers, a degree of over-reliance on non-volunteers which violates a lot of basic rules about how this is done.
As I said above, this absolutely doesn’t mean Trump’s going to lose. If it turns out the tide is going his way he can probably win even without much ground operation. But in my mind at least its clear that there’s a strong Potemkin village aspect to Musk’s whole operation. This isn’t just Dem wishful thinking.
