Donald Trump made the decision to disable the Republican Party’s get-out-the-vote operation, which means that in large swaths of the country, Trump has no operation on the ground.
Puck reported on the state of the ground game for Trump:
Then there’s the ground game. “We are totally f*cked in the field,” said a campaign source. “Whoever takes over the Southwest states has to start from scratch and it’s nearly f*cking October.”
As I’ve reported, the Trump campaign took a big gamble when they dismantled the R.N.C.’s ground operation and chose to outsource to super PACs, including Elon Musk’s America PAC. Now, in the final sprint to Election Day, there are mounting fears about Mar-a-Lago being in business with Phil Cox and Generra Peck, who were intimately involved in DeSantis’s failed PAC-campaign choreography and are now quarterbacking Musk’s operation. As I noted two weeks ago, there have been concerns inside Trumpworld ever since Cox and Peck fired the original canvassing vendors late in the game in July and replaced them with their own. Now The New York Times is reporting that Cox and Peck have fired another canvassing group, this time in the battleground states of Arizona and Nevada, leaving new vendors less than two months to knock on doors, collect data, and do digital advertising. (A source familiar with the PAC’s efforts countered that the change will help them to scale.)
Trump made the decision to save more money that he could put into his coffers to get rid of the Republican get-out-the-vote operation and outsource it to outside conservative groups.
This plan has been a disaster. The groups don’t have the resources to run a full ground operation for Trump, because of legal limits on how funds can be spent, so while Kamala Harris has thousands of field offices and thousands of staffers in the swing states alone, Donald Trump is holding rallies and hoping that hearing from him is enough to get his voters to the polls.
One of the reasons the Trump campaign was able to squeak out a close election win in 2016 was that Jared Kushner oversaw a sophisticated voter contact operation. In this operation, they contacted people who attended Trump rallies and made sure that they became Trump voters.
Now that Donald Trump is running the campaign, he decided that he doesn’t need those operations, so he dumped them.
The result is that Democrats are out-organizing Republicans on the ground, which means that the polls could end up overestimating Trump’s support because Republicans have no way of making sure that their voters show up.
This is an organizational disaster caused by Donald Trump that could cost the Republican Party the election.
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Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
