Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses party organizations and campaign finance. Trump is outsourcing his ground game.
Donald Trump's campaign, lacking the on-the-ground muscle to match Kamala Harris' team, has been rolling out a strategy to target swing-state voters who've shown interest in Trump but often don't vote.
Why it matters: Trump campaign training materials obtained by Axios offer an inside look into the strategy the ex-president's team is betting on to turn out voters in Pennsylvania and at least six other key states.
The big picture: The materials describe the 2020 Trump campaign's reach-out efforts as "inefficient," and emphasize the campaign's priorities of reaching more "quality" contacts in its race to the Nov. 5 election.Trump's team is outgunned in sheer resources: The campaign says it has about 27,000 volunteers on the ground overall, while Harris' campaign claims to have 60,000 in Pennsylvania alone.
As Axios has reported, Trump's campaign has focused more on developing an "election integrity" team of 175,000 poll workers and poll watchers nationwide, a program rooted in the ex-president's false claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election was fraudulent.
Turning Point Action, one of the more high profile groups involved in helping turn out the vote, has touted its efforts in the field and expressed pride in their initiatives. Founded by Charlie Kirk, it’s the political advocacy arm of Turning Point USA, a group that’s been controversial within some party circles for its flamboyant culture-war emphasis. One veteran GOP strategist described the group to Semafor as “a total grifting operation,” and others have had questions about standard metrics like the number of doors knocked and wondered how much work the group is actually doing.
One official with Turning Point Action emphasized they were not intended to lead the party’s overall efforts, but had a specific role which they said is “narrowly focused on low-propensity, disengaged Republican voters — a universe that comprises 300,000+ in Arizona and 300,000+ in Wisconsin, and then 40,000 in Michigan 7[th district] and 30,000 in Nevada’s 3rd.” According to an internal memo reported on in April, the group had a lofty goal of raising and spending over $108 million on a Chase the Vote program: They have not reached that aspirational number, Semafor was told, and can’t use funding from Turning Point USA, which is a 501(c)(3).
“I wish we had the resources to blanket Michigan and to blanket Nevada and blanket Georgia, like we’re doing [in] Arizona [and] Wisconsin,” spokesman Andrew Kolvet said in a statement. “But barring a last minute major infusion of resources we’re just simply not able to staff those regions like we’d want to.”
Hugo Lowell at The Guardian:
But the Pacs, which are supposed to bridging the gap, have been slow to spool up, according to people with direct access to the data for groups like America Pac, Turnout for America, Turning Point Action and America First Works.
They have only started to hire at a rapid clip in recent weeks, the people said, meaning they are reaching Trump supporters late in the cycle when it often takes repeated “voter contacts” to get them to return a ballot.
