Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020.ections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses party organizations and campaign finance.
Political scientists tend to downplay the role of campaign organization in presidential races, saying that it only matters at the margins.
But in a tight race, the margins are everything.
Donald Trump is betting that support from young men will help propel him to the White House. And he’s getting an assist from a crew of pro-Trump millennial pranksters who are capitalizing on college football tailgates, Tinder and even the “Hawk Tuah Girl” podcast.
The Nelk Boys, digital content creators and hosts of the popular “Full Send” podcast, are mounting a multi-million-dollar voter registration push aimed at turning out young men. They plan to sign up voters at a “Send the Vote” music festival later this month that will feature a performance by pro-Trump rapper Waka Flocka Flame, and at a pair of Penn State football games.
The proportion of self-identified Republicans who say they plan to vote for Kamala Harris in November has nearly doubled over the past month according to a major new survey from The New York Times/Siena College.
It found nine percent of likely voters who describe themselves as Republican plan to back the Democratic candidate in November, up from five percent in the last New York Times/Siena College poll a month earlier. By contrast just three percent of Democratic identifying voters said they will vote for Donald Trump, while 96 percent said they support Harris.
A number of prominent Republicans have said they will vote for Harris over Trump, including former vice president Dick Cheney, who in September said: "As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for vice president Kamala Harris."
In many ways, “lose by less” has become the key term in the presidential campaign, according to Anthony Chergosky, who teaches political science at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.
“Because Wisconsin elections are so competitive and so closely decided, the parties understand that any little gain anywhere could make the difference,” he said.
In Walworth County, Holly said the Wisconsin Democrats have a specific goal.
“I think the state figured out if we can pull 42%, then the state is good … everything we do here helps,” she said.
In 2020, President Biden won Wisconsin by just over 20,000 votes. Holly said that’s because of the work of places like the Elkhorn Democrats’ office.
Theodoric Meyer and Leigh Ann Caldwell at WP:
Vice President Kamala Harris is not going to win Somerset County, Pa.
She’s not even going to come close.
Former president Donald Trump carried this rural county about 60 miles southeast of Pittsburgh by 55 points in 2016, when he won Pennsylvania. He did even better there in 2020, despite losing the state to Joe Biden.
But Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) traveled to Somerset County anyway late last month to rally local Democrats. It’s one of more than a half-dozen events Fetterman has headlined across Pennsylvania in recent weeks in counties that Trump won by at least 20 points in 2020, including a stop last week in York County with Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
The stops align with the Harris campaign’s strategy to win Pennsylvania in part by running a little stronger in rural Republican strongholds than Biden in 2020 — a message that Fetterman echoed at a Somerset County Democratic Party fundraising dinner.
“It’s not about the color on the map,” Fetterman told more than 120 Democrats gathered in a century-old red barn on a Saturday evening a few miles from the field where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed on Sept. 11, 2001. “It’s about the margins in these counties.”
Harris’s strategy for cutting into Trump’s margins is built around out-organizing his campaign
The Harris campaign says it has 50 offices across Pennsylvania, including 16 in counties that Trump won by double-digits in 2020.
