Is Trump’s Ground Game Good Enough?

Trump visits a supermarket on September 23, 2024 in Kittanning, Pennsylvania. Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images

Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign generally seems a lot better organized and staffed than his two previous efforts. There’s less slapdash improvisation (other than the inevitable freelancing of the candidate himself when he speaks) and more seasoned pros on Team Trump than ever before. But in a desperately close race with Kamala Harris, “not as chaotic as in the past” may not be good enough. And as early voting begins, there are jitters among Republicans about the get-out-the-vote effort already underway, which could make the difference in the seven battlegrounds states that will decide the race. Here are some of the questions being raised.

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Is it a mistake for Trump to outsource his ground game?

Loosened federal rules about coordination between campaigns and outside super-PACs on get-out-the-vote initiatives have made it easier than ever to outsource such activities, and the Trump campaign has some allies eager to take on this work, including Elon Musk with his Save America PAC. But there are some risks in not keeping unified control of campaign operations.

Remember Ron DeSantis’s Never Back Down super-PAC? It was supposed to be the 900-pound gorilla ensuring the Florida governor’s omnipotence in early 2024 caucus and primary states through an incredibly well-funded and supposedly state-of-the-art program of door-knocking and other canvassing. Instead the DeSantis candidacy collapsed amid confusion and in-fighting between his campaign and his super-PAC, and he was out of the race before the New Hampshire primary.

Typically, in presidential races, the national party committee supervises the ground game. But Team Trump has denied the RNC that traditional role. So there are legitimate questions about who is in charge.

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Is Team Trump diverting old-school GOTV resources to too many other initiatives?

Typically, get-out-the-vote efforts in national elections focus on maximizing contacts with voters likely to support the party’s candidates. And again, these are usually conducted by the national party committees under the overall direction (in a presidential year) of the presidential campaign. That’s how Democrats are handling the ground game this year. But that’s not what the GOP is doing, and that’s worrying some Republicans, as NBC News recently reported:

Former President Donald Trump’s campaign thinks its new get-out-the-vote strategy will serve as a silver bullet to capture key battleground states. But increasingly concerned Republicans fear the Trump team is firing blanks. …

[T]he Trump team is tailoring its effort, carried out in conjunction with outside groups, to be focused primarily on what it has dubbed “low-propensity voters” — the people who are showing up in poll after poll saying they did not vote in 2020 but are breaking Trump’s way by a significant margin this time.

This voter-targeting initiative is diverting resources from more traditional wholesale voter-contact methods, giving many Republicans the impression they’re being outgunned by Democrats on the ground, notes NBC:

[A]s more than a half-dozen Republicans, many with experience in field operations and GOTV efforts, said, there is fear the Trump team doesn’t have enough action going on on the ground, particularly as Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign dwarfs their operation in terms of battleground field offices and staff and as Democrats can count on unions and other issue groups to boost their on-the-ground efforts. 

Additionally, for some time now the Trump campaign and the RNC have been spending a lot of time, money, and energy on “election integrity” plans for monitoring polling places and building evidence for post-election legal challenges if their candidate loses. If, like many Republicans, you privately concede Trump’s “voter fraud” obsessions are mostly a hoax, then this looks like a waste of precious resources that could be devoted to getting out Trump’s vote and/or to persuading swing voters.

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Will Trump’s mixed messages on early voting backfire?

In 2020, a lot of Republicans were frustrated by Trump’s constant attacks on voting by mail (and really, any non–Election Day voting), since historically GOP voters have been able to take advantage of “convenience voting” as much as or more than Democrats. This time around, GOP officials and Trump’s own campaign operatives have convinced him to cooperate with party efforts to encourage early voting as a way to “bank” base votes and then concentrate resources on swing voters. But Trump has an irrepressible habit of undermining early-voting pitches by arguing it ought to be illegal, as Politico noted this week:

Donald Trump urged voters Monday in Pennsylvania to vote early in the crucial swing state. Then, he quickly reversed course.

Early voting, the former president said, is “stupid” — even if it might help him as polls show him in a close race with Vice President Kamala Harris. …

Trump’s contradictory statements about what has become a common method of voting throughout the U.S. — and now embraced by many Republicans — reflects his hatred of a practice he says is vulnerable to fraud and helped cost him the 2020 election.

Minutes after urging people to vote early, he repeated his baseless claims of fraud in the 2020 election to several thousand supporters.

“What happened the last time was disgraceful,” he said.

To some extent, the big partisan gap that emerged in 2020 on willingness to vote by mail may have been a product to different perceptions of the risk of voting on Election Day in a pandemic. But Trump helped engineer it as well with his attacks on early voting, and it could cost the GOP some votes this year as well.

Perhaps all these fears about the Trump ground game will prove illusory; he is the candidate, after all, whose levels of support in battleground states were underestimated by polls in both 2016 and 2020. But if the contest with Harris is as close as it looks and feels right now, Trump’s campaign may regret going against the conventional wisdom in how it seeks to turn out his supporters.