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?

I get this question a lot: are right-wing pollsters flooding the zone? So I thought I would answer it generally in a single post.

Are they? Yes, they definitely are. But there are some important caveats and qualifiers to know to make sense of the whole story.

Just to review the basics: There are a series of Republican or right-wing pollsters who are overtly partisan, use questionable or floating methodologies and pretty clearly release polls not as a predictive enterprise but to produce friendly numbers for Republican candidates. The worst offenders are places like Rasmussen, Trafalgar, InsiderAdvantage. We know this from a mix of a lack of transparency about methodology, general behavior that betrays a goal of shaping election perceptions and outcomes rather than measuring public opinion, and extreme “house effects” — the tendency to favor a particular party’s candidates over the other’s relative to what most pollsters are finding — that support their agenda. After those, there’s a larger penumbra of often less-known pollsters who don’t appear to be as flagrant, but generally seem to be in the same category.

There’s deeply cynical and then there’s things which might be illegal. In the first category we have an Elon Musk-funded PAC microtargeting Jewish and Arab communities with diametrically opposed ads about Kamala Harris’s support for Israel or Palestine. Amazingly cynical. But then you have what I’m going to describe next, which comes from another Musk-funded dark money operation. They have set up fake sites impersonating the Harris campaign using fake policy positions and then sending out text messages also impersonating the campaign which aim to drive voters to the fake site. (A lot of potential legal and regulatory questions turns on word like “fake” and “impersonating,” which we’ll return to in a moment.)

Reuters has a story out reporting missed targets and internal investigations of inflated or faked doorknocking numbers at America PAC. That’s the Elon Musk PAC which now appears to be running most of the pro-Trump ground operation. Oddly, one of the sources in the Reuters piece is Alysia McMillan, an America PAC canvasser who was profiled in the Post just the day before yesterday. The story doesn’t totally have the goods — internal complaints about not meeting their election target, one Elon deputy investigating inflated numbers. Hard to know precisely what that means in the context of an operation involving tens of millions of dollars across multiple states. But it’s in line with lots of smoke and red flags about the whole operation.

There appears to be a scam text operation targeting ACTBLUE donors in which the text basically tries impersonate or imitate the kind of text you might get from your credit card company if there’s a suspicious transaction. If you’ve gotten one of these please let us know as soon as you can.