Over recent weeks I’ve tried to share with you a series of questions about the campaign or features of the campaign that could mean the difference between victory and defeat. Most of these aren’t cases where you say “this campaign has to do this” or “this campaign has to do that.” They’re mysteries to me at least at a deeper level. The one I’d like to discuss today I’ve mentioned a few times in earlier posts.
Remember back in the spring the Trump campaign and really the Trump family did a sort of forced takeover of the RNC and as part of that move they closed down the RNC’s Get Out The Vote or field operations and decided to outsource that work to a series of super PACs of which Elon Musk’s America PAC and the Turning Point USA’s PAC are the biggest? This wasn’t totally out of the blue or not totally without some rationale behind it. The FEC recently made a ruling that gave campaigns and parties greater ability to coordinate with super PACs on GOTV work. So there’s some logic to that. But it’s not obvious on that basis why you’d shut down the RNC’s GOTV operations. So questions about that move have hovered over this. Was this just dumb? Is there some financial interest at work? Is it just part of asserting total control over the party apparatus? Or is it actually just a good idea, allowing the unlimited dollars of these PACs to up the party’s game? The weight of logic and some evidence points to some mix of the first few answers. But it’s been hard to totally rule out the last one.
So now we’ve had two separate articles with state and national Republican operatives sounding alarm bells about how this is going. One was published about a week ago by the AP. And then a new one just came out in Politico. The gist and even structure of each article is similar enough that I’ll describe them as one, even though I assume they’re based on independent reporting and came out a week or so apart. Each focuses on unnamed, and in some cases named, Republican Party officials in the swing states essentially saying we’re not seeing any evidence of a ground game and we’re getting worried that we’re going to get swamped. These accounts are pretty credible — or at least it is pretty credible that these people mean what they say. Both in terms of morale and in terms of getting cross-wise with party leadership, no one wants to be saying this kind of stuff to the press. You do it because you’re trying to send up a warning sign to people in charge at the national level. It can also be, to some extent, the result of sour grapes. But in this context that’s not a very good explanation.
So the gist is that people working out in the swing states aren’t really seeing much of a ground operation and they’re getting worried. The Trump campaign’s response is that they’re super focused on very low propensity voters, and those voters are going to be especially present in rural and exurban areas while these operatives are used to focusing on the suburbs. On its face that doesn’t make a great deal of sense to me. The current GOP is really a party of rural and exurban America. Not exclusively of course. But that’s the base of the party, just as cities are for the Democrats. So it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me that GOP operatives aren’t familiar with these geographies or these kinds of voters. But I’ve never worked in GOTV operations and I certainly don’t have a strong sense of how Republicans do it. There’s also a question of just how low a propensity a voter you’re trying to get. The accounts suggest the focus is on Trump-inclined voters who weren’t successfully activated in 2016 or 2020 or at least not in both years. By definition those voters are probably pretty hard to turn out if they blew off one or both of the elections in which Trump was on the ballot. The strategy the Trump campaign is describing is at least consistent with the strategy stated in other contexts of semi-abandoning the suburbs and trying to squeeze a bit more juice out of rural and exurban America and, particularly, trying to turn out men in those areas.
So which is it? Is this an ingenious plan or is it just BS to explain why a lot of the purportedly outsourced super PAC GOTV isn’t happening. I genuinely don’t know. I don’t really know enough about that part of campaign work to have a knowledgable take on what I’m hearing. But there’s enough out there to suggest that some significant number of swing state Republican operatives and campaign people think the whole effort either looks like a bust or is just entirely MIA.
I’m curious to hear from readers who have experience with GOTV work generally or who are in the field in the swing states and might be able to share their own perceptions of what’s happening. For everyone else, as I noted at the top, it’s a basic question on which the outcome of the election could turn. So it bears watching closely.
