In this morning’s piece I mentioned going back to read articles I’d either missed on publication or read without focusing on these issues of ground game. One of the most interesting pieces in this category is the piece Tim Alberta wrote for The Atlantic which appeared just after the June debate disaster but a couple weeks before Biden’s departure from the race. The article is based on what seems to have been many months of reporting with a lot of access to the team running Trump’s campaign — Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles. There are a number of really quite interesting storylines in the piece. I’m going to focus on the question of ground operations. Even back before the events of the summer, this was a big enough deal that it is one of the two or three dominant issues the piece grapples with.
Let me start by explaining, based in large part on Alberta’s piece, what the Trump campaign’s argument and theory of the election is on its own terms. It goes like this. The suburbs are heavily polarized. There’s not that much being accomplished by traditional door-knocking and canvassing there. And it tends to be a mass game: How many doors you knock, how many conversations you have, etc., with not enough focus on whether you’re zeroing in on the high-value contacts. The campaign points to Iowa, which was a key early test for Trump’s fight for the renomination and also a sore spot from back in 2016 when Ted Cruz got a jump on Trump and actually beat him. In 2024, the campaign tried something different. The key premise of its approach is the belief that there is a substantial population of people who are really into Trump or at least very down with the Trump worldview but just don’t vote. They’re just totally disaffected from politics and the political world. But if they did vote they’d be certain to vote for Trump. This isn’t a crazy idea since disaffection from elite institutions and elements of mainstream culture is sort of inherent in Trumpism.
Rather than try to door-knock those people, the campaign found people in different communities who met the demographic markers of what we might call non-activated Trumpers and gave them relatively short lists of others in their community or neighborhood who they should engage with and get to vote. They call it “10 for Trump.” In other words, it’s a very decentralized approach. It’s not volunteers from out of state or paid canvassers. It’s people from the same community tasked with activating people from where they live and people like them.
They tried this in Iowa and it worked — or that’s what they claim. So a centerpiece of the Trump campaign plan is taking this nationwide. This is why they keep saying that it doesn’t matter what the standard GOP operatives say they’re not seeing. These operatives are looking for traditional door-knocking, especially in the suburbs. But that’s not what the campaign is doing. They have this very decentralized approach of empowering volunteers who are working over months to activate, individually, pretty small numbers of people. So at least on its face the “you’re not seeing what we’re doing” argument makes a certain amount of sense.
Two things to note though. The campaign claimed that the statistics showed that the places in Iowa where they invested most in this plan generated the biggest margins for Trump. But they wouldn’t show Alberta the actual statistics. Meanwhile other Republicans say this is all BS. Trump was always going to win Iowa for the same reason he won the nomination. He’s Trump. One Republican Alberta quotes makes the case that what really supercharged Trump was the first of his many indictments.
It’s hard to know from the outside who’s right about this. Are there these non-activated Trumpers? Can you really access them? And did Iowa, a fairly small and fairly rural state, really provide a sufficient test case? Who knows?
But Alberta focuses on another point which seems important for framing this question. You can’t really see this as a plan developed on its own merits. It was more making the best of a bad situation or making a bet required by straightened financial resources. Trump’s legal expenses were already taking up about a quarter of the money his campaign raised. He had forced the campaign to spend a huge amount of money on “ballot security” — basically, voter harassment as an antidote to the non-existent “rigging” in 2020. There simply wasn’t enough money to do any kind of traditional GOTV and the Iowa model was a low-cost alternative. Alberta put it this way:
A wide array of party officials I spoke with said that McDaniel, who declined to comment for this story, had lost the confidence of her members. And none of them disputed that the RNC ground game needed reassessing. But the abrupt directional change announced by Wiles and LaCivita, these officials told me, could only be interpreted as financial triage. It was unfortunate enough that Trump’s legal-defense fund steadily drained the campaign coffers; his insistence on this sweeping, ego-stroking program to “protect the vote” was going to cost an untold fortune. Given these constraints, Wiles and LaCivita knew that they couldn’t run a traditional Republican field program.
It’s very hard to piece together just what is happening in any of this. Because when I’ve read up on the super PACs’ ground game, half the time it sounds like they’re doing traditional GOTV and the other half of the time they claim they’re doing the super-targeted stuff the Trump folks claim they’re doing. But as near as I can make sense of this the progression goes like this: The Trump campaign — largely because of his legal expenses and “ballot security” — wasn’t going to have the resources to do traditional ground operations. So they decided to focus on the new, innovative plan for resource reasons. Turning Point Action came into the mix, it seems, because that was a way to pick up the traditional ground operation work. It all fit together.
There are two points here that seem worth focusing on. I don’t think we can rule out that the 10 For Trump stuff is real, real in the sense that it can work. But it doesn’t really make sense that you’d approach it as a binary choice — 10 For Trump versus a traditional ground operation everywhere else. What Alberta refers to as triage didn’t quite envision that. The Trump campaign would focus on the high-value Trumper activation and new FEC regs plus Charlie Kirk’s eagerness would allow them to offload a traditional ground operation onto the super PACs. Now that we’re in the final stretch, lots of observers just aren’t seeing much of any evidence that a traditional field operation is happening. Reading through a lot of reporting plus doing some additional reporting on my own, I don’t think this is just disgruntled consultants. This perception seems almost universal: the traditional stuff isn’t happening. The most logical explanation for that is that the super PAC thing just hasn’t panned out — which is supported by the stuff I talked about earlier with Turning Point Action. People looking for a traditional ground operation wouldn’t just see door knockers. They’d also know the known operatives who actually run these kinds of operations. That’s who you’d hire. But it seems like they weren’t hired. Again, state and local party officials would know that.
So just to back up. The Trump campaign was going to focus on the 10 For Trump stuff. The super PACs were going to focus on the traditional ground operations, focusing more on the denser-population areas. But that latter thing doesn’t seem to have panned out. So now we’re seeing a revised argument which is of course you’re not seeing a traditional ground operation because we’re not doing one. We’re doing this other thing. But that doesn’t seem like what the original plan was. And it could be a be problem. Let’s say 10 For Trump is twice is effective as a traditional ground operation. So 10 For Trump is 2x rather than 1x. If you do both, you’ve gone from 1x to 3x. But if you don’t do any of the traditional stuff you’re down to 2x. And just mathematically it’s probably iffy to assume that 10 For Trump is actually 2x. Maybe it’s just 1x. Or maybe it’s not even that.
As I’ve said, I would not interpret this as “the Trump ground operation is going to be a disaster.” It certainly doesn’t mean Trump’s going to lose. This is my best effort to piece together what’s happening. But I’m still very much in trying-to-find-information mode. It’s important to remember that even advocates for a strong ground operation usually think in terms of hustling out another percentage point of support on the ground. So it’s not like you win or lose in a landslide because of your field operation. It’s something that only comes into play in a close election. But this very much appears to be a close election. The best I’d say at this point is that there are some real indications there could be a shortfall of some degree in the Republicans’ ground operation. But I’m still trying to pull together more information. I don’t think I have the full picture yet. Please keep sending me more information to help me get it.
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