Before President Joe Biden ended his reelection bid, his loyalists held on to one last hope: that he could keep the race close enough that his more traditional ground game could outperform former President Donald Trump’s unconventional one in the Rust Belt, eking out an Electoral College majority and a second term.
Most senior Democrats concluded that it was more likely that Biden would put Virginia, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and perhaps even New Jersey in play than pull off this trifecta no matter how good his get-out-the-vote operations were, so he was replaced with Vice President Kamala Harris.
Now that Harris is, unlike Biden, actively competing in all seven battleground states, the hand-wringing over Trump’s ground game has resumed.
“It’s unproven,” a cautiously optimistic Republican strategist told the Washington Examiner.
“The only group I’m aware of that is actually knocking on doors in Georgia for Trump is [Elon Musk’s] America PAC,” influential conservative commentator Erick Erickson, who lives in the state, wrote on X Wednesday. “I know at least a dozen people in different parts of the state who have had someone at their house. No other groups have made contact with those voters.”
This echoes what a person Semafor described as a “Republican operative who votes in a swing state” told the outlet in a story published earlier this month: “I’m as plugged in as they get — and yet I don’t even know who my friends and family back home can contact for a yard sign or to knock doors in their precinct.”
The New York Times reported on Tuesday that the Musk super PAC ditched the canvassing firm it had hired to turn out Republicans and Trump voters in the swing states of Arizona and Nevada at this late date.
NBC News reported on Republican disagreements over a strategy to try to turn out low-propensity voters who have skipped out on previous elections when the GOP underperformed but are supportive of Trump this year.
The outlet’s Allan Smith, Matt Dixon, Henry Gomez, and Katherine Doyle write that “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.”
Finally, there has been no shortage of debate about whether Republicans are focused enough on mobilization and turnout compared to election integrity efforts.
“If it is going to be close, by the way, if it is a razor-thin close election, I’m pretty sure Kamala will win because they will cheat,” Trump-adjacent billionaire Peter Thiel, a close ally of vice presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), said recently at an All-In podcast event. “They will cheat. They will fortify it. They will steal the ballots.” (Thiel nevertheless predicted that “Trump is going to win and probably will win by a big margin,” improving on his 2020 showing.)
In a nutshell, Trump’s team has outsourced much of its ground game to outside groups like Musk’s super PAC, Turning Point Action, and America First Works rather than relying primarily on its own staff and the Republican National Committee. They are looking to get infrequent voters to the polls as well, a group that a recent New York Times-Siena College poll found backed Trump over Harris by 9 points.
Goosing noncollege white voter turnout alone could help swing battleground states toward Trump. “Let’s say Trump makes smaller gains among minorities but increases voter turnout among non-college-educated whites. He’d win the Electoral College even while losing the popular vote by about a point,” Republican strategist Ryan Girdusky wrote in his newsletter this week. “And even if he didn’t win a single new minority voter but pushed non-college-educated whites to vote as often as college-educated whites, he’d still have a massive Electoral College victory.”
Such voters were critical to Trump’s victory in 2016.
But when some of these plans were originally hatched, the electoral map was smaller. In this summer’s Atlantic interview with the operatives running Trump’s 2024 bid, co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita was said to believe there were four true battleground states rather than seven. “He said the campaign feels confident, based on public and private polling, as well as its own internal modeling, that Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina are moving out of reach for Biden,” the magazine reported, quoting a former Romney 2012 campaign adviser as saying Team Trump was “basically running four or five Senate races.”
After Biden dropped out, Harris put these Sun Belt states back in play. Among the concerns Republicans have is being spread too thin against her staffing and financial advantages. Yet the RealClearPolitics polling average has her ahead by just 0.1 points in the top battleground states, which Biden only won by 0.2 points after Trump outperformed his poll numbers for the second straight presidential election four years ago.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
With the Teamsters declining to endorse Harris amid rank-and-file support for Trump, it’s possible some voters the Democrats try to turn out end up pulling the lever for the former president instead. But Republicans don’t want to bet the election on that.
“What they are doing could work,” a Republican strategist said of Trump’s approach. “It’s just awfully risky.”