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.
Lisa Lerer, Reid J. Epstein and Maggie Haberman at NYT:
Veterans of presidential campaigns say this year’s contest is distinct for how little impact major political events seem to be having on the relative standing of the two candidates. Two assassination attempts on Mr. Trump, a presidential and vice-presidential debate and the party conventions have brought both him and Ms. Harris temporary bumps in support, but no enduring shifts in public opinion.Direct mail was cutting edge in 1976.
The result is what top officials in both campaigns describe as a grind-it-out race, where movements measured in a few thousand votes could sway the outcome of the entire election.
Ralph Reed, a socially conservative activist in Georgia who is helping turn out voters for the Trump campaign, said he could not recall a presidential race since 2000 in which so many states were effectively tied this late in the campaign.
“In the battleground states, it is like trench warfare during the First World War,” he said. “Everybody is dug in. Everybody is throwing artillery and machine gun fire, and it’s just a no man’s land.”
Mintt, a mail tracking firm, found that in September, 81 percent of all direct mail sent was promoting Mr. Trump or attacking Ms. Harris. In August, the imbalance had been even more severe: 96 percent of all direct mail relating to the presidential race was sent by Republican groups, the firm found.
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[Republicans] focused their ground game, much of which has included a untraditional reliance on third-party organizations, entirely on motivating their lowest-propensity supporters, with a particular focus on younger Black men in particular and young men in general.
Despite their sweeping field operation, some Democrats worry that the Harris campaign isn’t doing enough to reach those voters and other small subsets of their base.
Representative Debbie Dingell, a Michigan Democrat who publicly and repeatedly warned her party that they were going to lose her state in 2016, said Michigan remained a tossup both because of Israel’s war in Gaza and a lack of enthusiasm with the party’s core constituencies.
“I cannot describe to you the anger in all of our communities,” she said. “It’s really bad. The Jewish and the Arab American communities are concerned, and many are not there. African American young men express their frustration at being taken for granted. And it’s not clear that young people will turn out.”
