Donald Trump’s Weak Ground Game Could Be His Undoing

Along with persistent mysteries like “Why Vivek Ramaswamy?” and “What on earth is RFK Jr. doing?”, one of the puzzling legacies of the 2024 election cycle will be the apparently poor ground game of Donald Trump’s campaign.

Recent Gust of wind of News coverage We’ve noted how the Trump campaign has been slow and stingy in allocating field staff and resources to crucial battleground states, especially as the much better-funded and sharply focused Kamala Harris campaign sets its sights on those same battleground states. The Harris campaign has sent 375 paid staff coordinators to must-win Pennsylvania; the Trump campaign has sent anywhere from 50 to 90 staffers there. According to the UK Guardian.

This disparity is evident in every battleground state, and Trump’s campaign Right-wing super PACSome groups, such as Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point Action and Elon Musk’s USA PAC, are relatively new to the rigors of door-to-door canvassing and canvassing. Dissolved the company that he held With just seven weeks until Election Day, the group will oversee door-to-door canvassing efforts in Nevada and Arizona, while keeping a lower profile in other battleground states including Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin.

“I don’t know what the PAC is doing,” said Mark Forton, Republican chairman of Macomb County, Michigan, a legendary swing county. He told the Associated Press“I don’t know if they’re going door-to-door,” Nate Wilkowski, the party’s field director in neighboring Oakland County, said of America PAC. “Nobody has not notified me that they’re in the Oakland County area.”

To understand why these key campaigners disappeared at such a critical time, it’s important to look back at the strategic thinking of the Trump campaign when it was facing President Joe Biden, a time that now seems like a long time ago. Going back to the beginning of the Republican primaries, the Trump campaign single-mindedly focused on “low-leaning” voters – Republicans who were MAGA-leaning but not reliable, promising voters. In the Iowa caucuses, they employed a methodology they called “10 for Trump,” which identified 10 promising influencers at each caucus who could steer these voters to their candidate.

The strategy helped Trump win Iowa with 51 percent of the vote, despite a low turnout on caucus night when temperatures plummeted to minus 40 degrees Celsius. “My opponents were spending tens of millions of dollars on voter contact, going door to door,” said Chris LaCivita, co-chair of the Trump campaign. Grinned Atlantic Ocean“And we spent tens of thousands of dollars printing training brochures and pretty gold-embroidered hats,” he said, referring to the hats worn by MAGA-appointed district captains.

When the Trump campaign fired the RNC’s leaders in March and replaced them with its own activists, the campaign’s vision of a leaner, tightly managed ground game became the party’s new orthodoxy. And the money the RNC would save by outsourcing voter turnout efforts to a super PAC run by Musk and Kirk would be funneled into Trump’s Ahab-like MAGA obsession with “election integrity” — putting poll watchers at polling places and preparing for legal challenges in races won by Democrats. “The orders were clear,” he said. Atlantic Ocean Correspondent Tim Abelta writes: “Trump aides ended up dismantling much of the Republican National Committee’s existing ground war and redirecting resources toward a massive election integrity program, hiring scores of lawyers, holding hundreds of training seminars for poll watchers across the country, with the goal of organizing 100,000 volunteers to stand guard outside polling places, counting centers and even individual ballot drop boxes.”

As of early June, just before Biden decided to drop out, his campaign’s plan was to double down on awkwardly linked voter turnout and “election integrity” efforts, gambling on micro-targeting the same volatile supporters the Trump campaign had won in Iowa. This strategy was a long shot when Biden was the opponent, and it now looks even more unlikely with the Harris campaign gaining momentum.

At the time, LaCivita saw only four true battleground states – Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Arizona – with Nevada, North Carolina and Georgia out of reach for the Democrats. But that is clearly not the case now, and the four battleground states LaCivita selected are very favorable for Harris. The Republican Party’s targeted, no-frills, low-key campaign strategy is increasingly unsettling state and local campaigners on the right. Turning Point Action and USA PAC are being called upon to turn out the low-key campaigning that was the RNC’s strength in the 2016 and 2020 election cycles, but so far there are few signs of success. Kirk’s voter turnout drive is limited to a small percentage of potential voters. PAC officials say said Semaphores Reporters Shelby Talcott and Burgess Everett “It focuses on voters who are less likely to lean Republican and less interested, including more than 300,000 in Arizona, more than 300,000 in Wisconsin and 40,000 in Michigan.”[th district] 30,000 in Nevada’s 3rd District.”

Despite this limited mission, the group reportedly fell far short of its $108 million fundraising goal. That may explain why so few state and local party officials have seen Turning Point Action recruiters. But another Republican official offered a more succinct explanation: Kirk’s super PAC is “a total fraud,” he told Republican lawmakers. Semaphores Another Republican working to increase voter turnout in several states echoed similar sentiments. Pessimistic assessment Dispatch Politics“Big press release, big tweets, lots of smoke, very little work.”

Meanwhile, Musk’s US PAC operation, like the rest of Musk’s operations, has a larger financial reserve but suffers from poor direction and focus, as shown by its sudden reversals in Nevada and Arizona. The operation is led by Gennare Peck and Phil Cox, who both worked on the debacle of Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign, which is notorious for squandering around $100 million in super PAC funds. A useless voter mobilization planThe relationship between high right-wing capital and low performance is not new: Jeb Bush’s disastrous defeat in the 2016 primary was due in part to the millions mobilized by his ludicrously named super PAC, Right to Rise.

That’s why more traditional Republican election officials are sounding the alarm. “There’s no concrete evidence that Trump and the RNC have invested in the kind of ground-up work that’s needed to drive turnout in elections,” said one battleground-state Republican official. He told NBC News“Local Republicans are not being asked to go door-to-door, make phone calls, text voters or even collect mail-in ballots. Instead, they are being asked to serve as poll watchers in Republican-leaning counties and areas with Republican voters.”

Such warnings are especially urgent because Trump’s surprising strength in 2020 was due in large part to the lack of ground-up activism from the Democratic Party. Biden’s party was held back by COVID-19 social-distancing measures, which did absolutely nothing to boost Republican turnout. Now that Democrats are free from such concerns, strengthen one’s ground operations Outspent Republicans in battleground states $5 million per dayIn this climate, it’s understandable that Republican activists in battleground states are frustrated that Republican National Committee officials are telling themselves that Charlie Kirk and Elon Musk are going to somehow innovatively dig their way out of the hole they’re digging.