Josh Marshall

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Josh Marshall is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of TPM.

The Origins of Trump Campaign’s New Approach to Field Operations

In this morning’s piece I mentioned going back to read articles I’d either missed on publication or read without focusing on these issues of ground game. One of the most interesting pieces in this category is the piece Tim Alberta wrote for The Atlantic which appeared just after the June debate disaster but a couple weeks before Biden’s departure from the race. The article is based on what seems to have been many months of reporting with a lot of access to the team running Trump’s campaign — Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles. There are a number of really quite interesting storylines in the piece. I’m going to focus on the question of ground operations. Even back before the events of the summer, this was a big enough deal that it is one of the two or three dominant issues the piece grapples with.

Let me start by explaining, based in large part on Alberta’s piece, what the Trump campaign’s argument and theory of the election is on its own terms. It goes like this. The suburbs are heavily polarized. There’s not that much being accomplished by traditional door-knocking and canvassing there. And it tends to be a mass game: How many doors you knock, how many conversations you have, etc., with not enough focus on whether you’re zeroing in on the high-value contacts. The campaign points to Iowa, which was a key early test for Trump’s fight for the renomination and also a sore spot from back in 2016 when Ted Cruz got a jump on Trump and actually beat him. In 2024, the campaign tried something different. The key premise of its approach is the belief that there is a substantial population of people who are really into Trump or at least very down with the Trump worldview but just don’t vote. They’re just totally disaffected from politics and the political world. But if they did vote they’d be certain to vote for Trump. This isn’t a crazy idea since disaffection from elite institutions and elements of mainstream culture is sort of inherent in Trumpism.

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Digging Into Turning Point USA’s Role in the Trump 2024 Ground Game Prime Badge
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So, I’ve been trying to poke around further into my new favorite mystery: the GOP ground operation and what on earth is going on with it. So far, I’ve been looking back at articles I’d read on publication and rereading them, and at articles I had not read and reading them for the first time, for clues into the Trump/RNC ground game question that I’ve been discussing in recent posts. One thing I hadn’t fully grasped or perhaps had forgotten is that Turning Point USA and its chieftain Charlie Kirk had a big role in pushing for the ouster of Ronna McDaniel at the RNC. And the push seems to have been in significant measure about wanting to take over or play a bigger role in GOP field operations. So a substantial amount of the impetus for all of this appears to have originated with Turning Point and its campaign arm, Turning Point Action. So that’s one clue.

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More on Trump Ground Operations, or the Lack Thereof Prime Badge
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As I’ve explained, this issue of turnout operations and what we can glean about them is one of the things I’m most interested in finding out more about as we hurtle into the last 30 days of the campaign. None of the information I’ve found so far gives any definitive answers. I’m not even sure definitive answers are possible. But I’m going to pass on some interesting hints I’m finding. The thing you hear again and again about canvassing and ground operations is that you cannot just overwhelm it with money. Money is obviously critical. But you need a lot of institutional experience and time to make it work. With TV ads you really can overwhelm it with money. Get a billionaire with unlimited funds, cut some good ads and get them on TV. Done and done. One of the big factors operating now in swing states is that outside groups are paying 10 to 25 times the ad rates of campaigns. But still, unlimited money can help with that. Canvassing and field operating takes time and institutional experience.

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Locked

I’m a broken record on this. But I’m struck by the relative stasis of the Harris-Trump presidential campaign. It hasn’t always felt like that of course. It’s hard on the nerves. And it’s not like nothing has happened. We’ve had a sitting president drop out of the race, a mind-boggling two assassination attempts, a smackdown of a debate, two conventions. And yet stability in the polling numbers has been the calling card of this race. Joe Biden was behind. He fell further behind starting about two weeks after the June debate. After he dropped out Harris immediately moved the race into a tie. Then over a couple weeks she opened up a lead of roughly three points. It’s basically stayed right there for the last two months. The minor undulations have been so small as to likely represent little more than churn and statistical noise.

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Have Pollsters Figured Out How to Poll for Trumpers? Prime Badge
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One thing we’ve talked about a lot this year in the Backchannel and the podcast is changes pollsters have made to their methodologies over recent years, in large part because of 2016 and 2020 polling errors tied to Trump. Kyle Kondick, of Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, posted two good links on this that I wanted to share with you. The first is this short interview with Professor Charles Franklin of Marquette Law School who runs what is generally considered the signature in-state poll in Wisconsin and one of the most reliable nationwide. (Some of you may remember that Franklin was our polling methodology advisor back in the days of TPMPollTracker.) Then there’s this short article which goes over the changes industry-wide.

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More on GOTV and Campaign Field Operations

This note from TPM Reader DK doesn’t answer for us the questions we discussed yesterday about Republican GOTV efforts. But it does point to key questions to ask to find out more. And I found it just a fascinating window into the nuts and bolts of campaign field operations.

I’ve done GOTV for two decades, including my own campaign long ago. A few observations:

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Debate Wrap Up

So I think this debate was basically a draw. Vance was smooth and organized. He approached normality. He was often clearer than Tim Walz was. Tim Walz is not a terribly articulate debater. That’s something the Harris campaign tried to telegraph last week. And I think it was a good idea to do that. On those fronts, Vance did better. Vance was also on message. He literally tied everything to inflation and immigration. Even the most preposterous things he brought back to those issues. Vance definitely did well on that front too.

But Walz did better than I think some people may realize because with all the jumbliness and clackity clink he got in the story of the women whose lives were lost or endangered by Trump state abortion bans. Again and again, there were key points, key stories that the Harris campaign clearly wanted him to say from the stage and he did, even if they were surrounded by Walzian word fugue. And that really matters more than how focused he was as a speaker. He got those things. That matters more.

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Okay, Let’s Get Weird

10:41 PM: Walz is just bumbly and floppity again and again. But on a number of these issues Vance is just so obviously full of it Walz still wins on points. And that’s happening more as the debate goes on. That happened on Obamacare and on democracy and Jan 6th. Abortion too.

10:17 PM: I just cannot believe that Vance is actually claiming that Trump made Obamacare work.

9:57 PM: There’s an odd dynamic in this debate. Vance is doing well. He’s smooth. He’s hitting his points. Walz is kind of jangly. Not nearly as smooth. He stumbles over sentences. If you look at this and say, who’s smoother? Who’s clearer? I think that’s Vance. But what Walz is doing is hitting the key lines the campaign wants him to say. Often he gets to them in response to questions about other things. But he hits them. The stories of these women who died or almost died from Trump abortion bans. So I think he’s hitting his marks too.

9:46 PM: Sidled up to JD’s menstrual surveillance racket. Appreciate that.

9:44 PM: I really wish Walz would have been more clear on the the fact that for all Trump’s chatter about bringing jobs home it’s actually Biden and Harris who are doing that with the IRA.

9:27 PM: It’s fascinating how both these guys are basically saying each other is great.

9:20 PM: It’s interesting that Vance was not remotely willing to defend mass deportation. Basically wrote it off.

9:16 PM: Okay, I don’t expect Republicans to make a lot of sense on climate but someone’s got to dig into JD’s argument about climate which if I understand it is basically that the best thing for the climate is to do all our manufacturing in the U.S. and also to drill a bunch more oil.

9:14 PM: Okay, I’m not sure JD’s climate answer made any sense. I mean, creative, but not a lot of sense.

9:06 PM: It’s interesting. Just in the first two answers I’d say both guys answered pretty well for their campaigns. Very different answers. But each hitting their marks.

Thoughts on Iran/Israel Conflict

This is a fast moving situation. I’m not a military expert. Watch the military experts for military updates. But some thoughts come to mind. First, it seems unimaginable that Israel won’t retaliate in force directly against Iran. That’s just a fait accompli. It was frankly surprising that the response in April was so limited. But there’s a difference between a show a strength to reestablish deterrence on the one hand and actual strategic gains on the other. It seems to me that the big strategic gain is the one that Israel is in the midst of and what prompted Iran’s missile attack today in the first place. That is, in essence: dismantling or at least seriously degrading the capacity of the Hezbollah militia and rocket capacity. Hezbollah is not solely creature of Iran. But that’s what makes it such a military force. It’s there to be a forward arm of Iran, a source of deterrence vis a vis Israel as well as being part of a longer term strategy of encircling Israel and killing it through a death of a thousand cuts. The biggest gains seem possible against Hezbollah more than in Iran. The exception is Iran’s nuclear plants. Those are of course heavily reinforced. And attacking them in force directly would be a further escalation. But Michael Oren, the former Knesset member and former Israeli Ambassador to U.S., was on CNN this afternoon and he focused on the fact that the killing of Hassan Nasrallah shows Israel has the ability to cut through multiple layers of reinforced concrete. Oren isn’t currently in government. But that message seemed very clear.

What’s Going on With Trump’s Outsourced GOTV Effort?

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.

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