As you might expect, the mystery of the GOP ground game and Elon Musk’s late, bulldozer entry into the 2024 campaign has become a fascination of mine even apart from its relevance to the outcome of the campaign. It really seems now that most of Musk’s supposed $150 million contribution to the Trump effort was simply lit on fire. I should note that even by their own accounts not all of that money was slated for ground operations and get out of the vote efforts. Some went to mailers, yard signs and other kinds of advertising. But it’s become one of the hallmarks of this campaign that Trump-aligned canvassers and door knockers are just nowhere to be found really anywhere in the swing states. To be clear, I’m not saying none — like no one has seen a single one anywhere. But what’s wild is that what I’m describing is actually not that far off than that. Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina. Even in Arizona and Nevada I haven’t heard much that contradicts it. I’ve just had less visibility altogether.
I’ll be curious to see afterwards just what the ad money went to. A few days ago Musk’s group released a wink-haha churlish ad which called Harris a c-word. The “joke” was that at the end it’s revealed that the c-word they meant was “communist” rather than that c-word. Get it? Ha ha. Except not really. You’ve got to be tapping into the very hived off, incel-adjacent far-right bubble to have anything like that surface in a political ad. This is the kind of stuff you get when your campaign NCOs are emotionally stunted bros who had their political awakenings on incel message boards and 4chan. It’s reminiscent of those weird beefcake viral videos produced by the DeSantis campaign. (Remember that America PAC is literally run by the people who ran the big DeSantis super PAC.) Like I said, maybe the money was just lit on fire.
One nugget that grabbed my attention maybe a week ago was when Musk’s group put out some pushback against one of the many articles questioning his effort. I believe he said that America PAC was making 100,000 voter contacts or door knocks a week. But as one of my campaign contacts pointed out, that was a really low number. State efforts were doing multiples of that in individual swing states. So it wasn’t just that they appear to have a kind of Potemkin operation. Even what they are claiming they have accomplished is anemic when you talk about an effort supposedly operating across seven swing states and actually in additional states with major Senate and congressional races.
I could see this Musk story becoming a billionaire-dom morality tale in which it’s illustrated what money can and can’t buy. Obviously if Trump wins the election that story is going to have a lot less oomph in it. But I’m not sure it will make it any less true. Billions gets you ads and mailers. It’s harder to stand up a ground operation on short notice.
