Former President Donald Trump’s campaign believes his new get-out-the-vote strategy will serve as a silver bullet to capture key battleground states. But increasingly concerned Republicans fear that Trump’s team is running loopholes.
The former president’s campaign unveiled an untested research and voter engagement model that could pay off big if executed successfully. Days passed He leads the Republican National Committee and aims to hit the highest number of contacts possible.
Now the Trump team is tailoring its efforts with outside groups to focus primarily on what it calls “low-propensity voters” — people who appear in polls who say they didn’t vote after polls. 2020, however, breaks Trump’s path this time by a significant margin.
Meanwhile, published a review Earlier this year, the Federal Election Commission allowed campaigns and outside groups to work more closely on voter turnout efforts. While not allowing full coordination, the decision allowed less regulated money to play a larger role in this space.
“The campaign is really very focused on a relatively small but very important group of voters who are quite aloof from politics,” he said. battle states this past week. “Traditional field efforts at the RNC have really only focused on volume as much as possible, and that ultimately dictates a set of options that many of these people miss out on.”
The concerns, the person said, came from Republicans used to seeing “a bunch of press releases from the RNC or the state GOP” detailing how many doors were knocked on. They added that there is a campaign conducted the lessons From the GOTV effort to recruit “precinct caucus captains” in Iowa. The Swamp the Vote infrastructure was created to promote postal voting among the former president’s constituents, the person said.
But as more than half a dozen Republicans, many of whom have experience in field operations and GOTV efforts, say, there are fears that Trump’s team is not doing enough on the ground, especially to dwarf Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign. operational in terms of battleground offices and staff, and Democrats can rely on unions and other issue groups to bolster their efforts on the ground. They also expressed concern that outside groups tasked with much of the voter engagement portfolio were not doing as well as they had originally hoped.
“Some of us always thought it was one bad ideabut wanted to trust the decision and not waver,” said the veteran Republican, who has expressed concerns about outsourcing much of the operation to the Trump team. “I think we’re seeing some of those concerns become reality to some extent.”
“I think Trump can and will still win, but there are unnecessary complications that we’re seeing,” the person said.
Operatives in both parties have long said that door-knocking and other forms of voter contact, including phone banking, texting and mailings, can make a difference at the edge of an election, perhaps increasing that party’s turnout by about 1%. But with recent presidential elections in key swing states defined by such narrow margins, the difference may come down to which side is more successful in ground operations.
“There is no tangible evidence that Trump and the RNC are investing in the kind of game you need in turnout polls,” said a Republican operative in the swing state. “Local Republicans are not required to knock on doors, make phone calls, text voters or even collect mail-in ballots. Instead, they are asked to work with Republican officials to observe voting in Republican states or localities.”
But Trump’s team and allies say these Republicans simply aren’t looking in the right place. The campaign partnered with a number of outside groups to carry out the on-the-ground effort, including Torning Point Action, America First Works and America PAC, a super PAC aligned to Elon Musk.
FEC shows records America spent PAC So far, more than $52 million in voter engagement efforts and recruitment of prominent GOP- Blitz CanvassingSeptember Group and Strategies in the Field. It is supported by donations from Jimmy John’s founder James John Liautaud; Shaun Maguire and Douglas Leone of Sequoia Capital; and the Winklevoss twins, among others.
America PAC is actually led by two GOP operatives who played a major role in Gov. Ron DeSantis’ case. campaign: Genera Peck and Phil Cox, Like the New York Times reported first.
“There’s a general confusion among the old guard about what happened after the FEC decision,” said a Republican operative who works on pro-Trump voter engagement efforts. “Now it’s not working like it used to, people are confused, so they’re saying it’s not good, rather than just a change of parties doing the work. When done this way, you can have more innovative work than if you were limited to the old structure. So I think it’s an over-the-top criticism by people who don’t know what they’re talking about.”
“Some bands are better than others”
Concerns about Republican field efforts are nothing new. An NBC News study last year foundthe party was spending millions on turnout operations, which insiders said suffered from significant flaws and poor oversight. Large-scale conservative investigative efforts have been plagued by problems, including falsified and unreliable data inputs, as these Republicans explain. But Republicans insist it will be useful, and major donors are willing to fund the effort.
One Trump campaign staffer said that focusing on low-propensity voters instead of goals built around reaching the most voters possible removed incentives to submit false data entries, adding that the complaints came from operatives who were “cut off” from high-profile voters. -dollar contracts.
“From my understanding, everything is going well,” this person said. “Some states run better programs than others. …I’ve heard complaints from people who complain, but a lot of them are mad because they can’t quit the campaign.”
But a group that has long been the target of Republican scrutiny for its promises of land play Turning pointwho sets a goal earlier this year He spent more than 100 million dollars on the “Chase the Voices” program. Now the group said Semaphoreits efforts will be narrower in scope and more centralized in Arizona and Wisconsin, where it is headquartered.
“I wish we had the resources to cover Michigan and cover Nevada and Georgia [in] Arizona [and] Wisconsin,” Turning Point Action spokesman Andrew Colvet said in a statement Semaphore. “But if we block a huge infusion of resources at the last minute, we simply cannot staff these regions as we would like.”
Turning Point Action did not respond to requests for comment from NBC News. A Republican operative with experience in field operations said in a statement that the Semaphore group confirmed the warnings Republicans have shared with Trump for months about the Tipping Point and that the campaign has contributed to the expansion of its domestic program in recent weeks.
A senior Trump campaign official said the campaign was not caught off guard by Turning Point, which has a more limited reach, and is working closely with the organization.
“Some groups are better than others,” this person said more broadly.
Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley defended both ties to outside groups and an internal operation directly controlled by the RNC and the Trump campaign, which have long been functionally combined, to help turn out the vote.
“We have more opportunities to have additional resources that other groups have,” he said. “We have a large, strong in-house voting operation, but we also work with third parties.”
Earlier this month, the Trump campaign presented a detailed overview of GOTV and the field program to House Republicans, a source familiar with the call said. In addition, a campaign source with direct knowledge of the GOTV strategy said the field program will naturally increase as the election nears, but added that there is a new sense of urgency as the race tightens with Harris replacing President Joe Biden.
“I feel good about the ground game,” said Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “I’m worried about the funding gap after you see Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign funneling $10 million to the Democratic Senate race. … Our biggest challenge right now is getting the resources to the front to win.”
Poll watchers and canvassers
Republicans have also raised concerns that efforts to spend more money on election integrity efforts in light of Trump’s 2020 election rigging have left GOTV efforts underfunded and understaffed. Republicans say more volunteers are trained to be poll watchers than volunteers. Trump, meanwhile, has made it clear that he has all the votes he needs, insisting that the key to his victory will be tracking revenues.
“We want to be in the room,” Whatley said of having RNC staff and volunteers at the ballot counting sites. “We’ve recruited more than 175,000 volunteers across the country. We are training them and will deploy them as ballot workers and election observers.”
The Trump campaign sees Democrats actually having a tougher hand when it comes to GOTV — largely because they saw a drop in ballot polls compared to 2020 at the height of the Covid pandemic. Democrats will need to get more of their voters into precincts that haven’t voted in person before, a senior campaign official said. The person also said they were encouraged by the voter registration numbers, pointing to the registration of 90,000 voters in the war zone in the last two months during the campaign itself.
“The results, the actions you want to take that will be indicative of the voter downstream … are on our side,” this person said.
But like others who spoke to NBC News, the Republican operative with experience in field operations isn’t sold, noting that even with a big ground game in 2020, Trump has fallen short on key battlegrounds.
“You have to remember that Donald Trump got more votes for a current president than at any other time in history,” this person said. “Now you don’t have people squeezing all the juice out of an orange. They’re just focused on this very small universe [low-propensity] voters. So you leave it to chance that swing voters won’t be persuaded by the left.”