The Times has a piece up this morning which is largely complimentary of Elon Musk’s political operation and Musk himself. It’s a far cry from the range of critical pieces which have been published elsewhere and which I’ve published. It rather confidently reports that Musk’s canvassers are hitting “well over 100,000 doors a day,” for instance, “according to a person with knowledge of the group’s activities.
Needless to say, that’s almost certainly someone from America PAC or someone who works directly for Musk. So the Times appears to be going purely off their say so. Which strikes me as more than a little odd.
Having said all this, Musk has spent a vast amount of money — “$134 million on the presidential campaign and 18 congressional races, 60 percent of which has been dedicated to voter canvassing operations.” As the Times makes clear in the article, even if that sum has been spent in the most incompetent and shambolic manner possible, it’s hard to imagine it hasn’t had some effect somewhere. Even if half the Musk door-knocks are phony and fraudulent, that still leaves quite a few real ones.
The article also makes clear — and this is the more interesting part of the piece — that Musk, at least for now, seems to be excitedly planning for the political future beyond this campaign. That’s probably where the most interesting story is. He’s a man of obsessions. And with a couple hundred billion dollars. He can fund a lot of obsessions.
But what to make of the disconnect I’m describing? I don’t have a real explanation. I have either read or received directly multiple accounts of voters and political operatives in multiple swing states simply seeing no evidence of Musk’s operation. There have been repeated similar accounts in a range of publications over the last couple months. The piece I mentioned earlier is just the latest example. This certainly isn’t just me saying so. I do not see how that can be reconciled with the Times’ account of a juggernaut political operation hitting 100,000 doors a day.
The one exception I see pretty clearly is in Arizona and, to an extent, the efforts targeted at Hispanic voters. But the operation in Arizona seems to be in the hands of what remains of Turning Points Action’s operation. They’re based in Arizona. It’s the one place they’re still executing their original plan. So there may be a real and robust GOTV operation in Arizona. But the evidence we have suggests it’s the one place where Musk isn’t operating.
The Times article also notes that Musk is particularly focused on Hispanic voters. So that may be part of the equation. And perhaps that’s operating somewhat under the radar. But that still doesn’t explain why the normal stomping grounds of GOTV operations in the suburbs don’t seem to be seeing any Musk operation at all.
At a minimum the Times article seems fairly ingenuous in taking Musk’s statistics more or less at face value given all the reporting raising serious questions about his operation. Beyond that, though, I really don’t know. Probably the most plausible explanation is that there’s a huge amount of blown or inefficiently spent money. But the amount of money is so vast that quite a lot is still getting done. But again, I’m not sure even that quite explains the widely held impression — from Democrats who are excited by it and Republicans who are dismayed — that there’s just not much evidence of such an effort across most of the key swing states. Indeed, a few of my sources point out that 100,000 doors a day actually isn’t all that much at this stage of the campaign if you’re operating in all the swing states and in other states for down-ballot races.
Maybe Musk’s and Trump’s operations have found some different way to turn out voters. But in terms of traditional GOTV and door knocking at least I have to think the Times just got taken in a bit in this piece. To me the evidence just seems too one-sided.
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