Trump's Ground Operation Is Failing to Launch

More and more reporters are starting to notice how Trump is bungling the ground game

For my Washington Monthly column today, I reviewed the history of the gender gap in presidential elections, and examined recent polling to assess whether Kamala Harris is performing well enough with men—or unusually strong with women—to successfully navigate the gap.

Most current polling suggests that Harris has grabbed a narrow lead in the national popular vote and, as noted in Tuesday's newsletter, in most battleground states.

Because the gender gap has been so wide for so long, even if Harris navigates it well, the race may still be very close.

And when a race is close, the outcome may be determined by which campaign has the better get-out-the-vote operation.

You may recall that two months ago for the Washington Monthly, I flagged that Donald's Trump's Get-Out-The-Vote Plan is Bonkers, as it relies heavily on outside groups, especially the far-right Turning Point network, despite its lack of campaign experience and dubious finances.

Furthermore, Trump forced out the former Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel at the urging of Turning Point's leader Charlie Kirk to execute the plan. (As I said before, this looks like a scandal and Republicans should be outraged.)

And in this newsletter two weeks ago, I noted that Trump's "you won't have to vote anymore" riff, delivered at a Turning Point conference, was part of that GOTV plan—pressing irregular right-wing voters to show up this year.

Recent reporting from the Washington Post and The New York Times about Trump's ground game has reinforced my view.

I'll lay out the gory details, but first, here's what's leading the Washington Monthly website:

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Are Men Ready For Kamala?: My review of the gender gap in past presidential elections, and how current polls compare. Click here for the full story.

Lessons in Leadership from Howard Baker: Ira Shapiro, a former Senate aide and Clinton Administration trade ambassador, and Keel Hunt look back at the life of the former Senate Majority Leader, 50 years after his role investigating the Watergate scandal. Click here for the full story.

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Many Republicans are not only worried about Trump's misguided messaging, but also about his mismanaged turnout operation. On August 3, the Washington Post reported, "With fewer than 100 days before the election, local GOP officials in battleground states have raised alarms about the scant presence of Trump campaign field staff."

"The Trump campaign’s shrunken in-house operation resulted from its takeover of the Republican National Committee in March," noted the Post. The "RNC had been planning an extensive field program," but an anonymous source told the Post that the detailed plans were "totally discarded" following the takeover.

The Post was present for a June volunteer training led by Turning Point's Chief Operating Officer Tyler Bowyer.

You might call it "weird":

Bowyer instructed the organizers not to come on too strong by showing up with MAGA hats and fliers. Instead, they should research their marks and start reaching out through Facebook groups, community events, or neighborly gestures such as recommending plumbers or harp teachers. They could even arrange seemingly chance encounters on coffee runs or dog walks.

“Some of these things sound like stalking,” one staffer whispered.

“Professional stalkers,” his colleague joked back.

As one slide from the training implored: “BE NORMAL. BE NORMAL. BE NORMAL.”

So if a stranger sidles up to you to recommend a harp teacher, now you know why.

Eleven days after the Post story, The New York Times checked in on Trump's GOTV efforts, and they still look like a mess.

The Times report focused on new Federal Election Commission guidelines that allow for direct coordination of turnout programs between campaigns and Super PACs—the linchpin of Trump's outsourcing strategy.

However, according to the Times:

Senior Republican Party officials fear that the decision — and the Trump campaign’s efforts — will lead to the party losing considerable control over get-out-the-vote operations, much as they have in the world of television advertising, where the scripts and strategies are often crafted by super PACs with their own ambitions and ideas.

...

For all the cost-savings, the risks of such coordination, veterans of Republican campaigns say, are plentiful. There are opportunities for miscommunication. There is a branding issue: Voters in battleground states likely have heard of their state Republican Party, but probably not a national super PAC started mere weeks ago. And many super PACs have never organized a canvassing operation at a scale like this, while Republican Party officials and activists have honed their practice over many election cycles.

Veteran campaign organizers are also aghast at the money that some super PACs intend to spend, skeptical that outside organizations will be able to quickly build big enough canvassing operations in a tight labor market, no matter how big the budget.

The Times highlighted the internal chaos consuming Elon Musk's attempt to get in on the GOTV game:

One outside group, America PAC, has had ambitions to spend upward of $180 million to hire thousands of paid canvassers and deploy them across the country. But the group has been plagued by drama as it seeks to follow the direction of one of its mercurial founders, Elon Musk, the owner of the social media platform X who recently endorsed Mr. Trump.

The group spent over $15 million to train and deploy canvassers who made about $500 a week in nine states — only to abruptly lay them all off after the super PAC was taken over by past aides to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. The super PAC had 200 to 250 paid staffers knocking on almost 100,000 doors a week alone in Nevada, Arizona, California and Oregon, according to a person with knowledge of the effort, the last two being solidly Democratic states that the Trump campaign likely would not have invested in.

More and more reporters are starting to notice how Trump is bungling the ground game. Still, the ouster of McDaniel and the handoff of GOTV responsibilities to amateurs strikes me as one of the most underreported stories of this wild election year.

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Best,

Bill Scher, Washington Monthly politics editor