Elon Musk and Donald Trump have a lot in common. For one thing, everything they touch turns into crap. Musk is tanking Tesla and Twitter/X, and his latest flop is politics. Reuters is reporting that Musk’s pro-Trump America PAC, which Musk has funded with more than $75 million, is struggling in every corner of its operations and is “plagued by disarray.”
America PAC’s swing-state strategy is to reach out to non-voters and low-propensity voters (mostly men) who would be likely to vote for Trump if they could bother to get off the couch to vote. Many political campaign experts have called this a much riskier strategy than the traditional effort of doing GOTV to reach out to people who you already know support your party and your candidate and have voted for you in the past — a much lighter lift.
Aside from the inherent risk of this strategy, it turns out that America PAC is struggling to meet its outreach targets. Four people involved in the group's outreach told Reuters that managers warned canvassers they are missing targets and needed to raise the number of would-be voters they contact.
Alysia McMillan, who canvassed for the PAC in Wisconsin, said field organizers recently told campaigners there they weren't reaching daily objectives and were on track to miss an ultimate goal of contacting 450,000 voters by Election Day. In one meeting with canvassers, recorded by McMillan and reviewed by Reuters, a manager warned of the shortfall.
"We're not going to hit 450,000, not with what we've got now," the manager said in the Oct. 8 meeting. It isn't clear how many knocks the Wisconsin teams have reached so far.
Canvassers in other states say they’ve been told similar things about missing targets. I’ll note that McMillan tells Reuters she’s a strong Trump supporter and is speaking out because she wants Trump to win and fears that the failing Musk-backed effort will “result in a waste of time and money and risk President Trump winning the election.”
In addition to missing outreach targets, some of the PAC’s canvassers are apparently faking their outreach numbers — forcing the group to conduct canvassing audits at this late stage in the game.
Three other people familiar with the outreach told Reuters that Chris Young, a Musk aide and longtime Republican operative, had recently traveled to Nevada to audit whether doorknocking tallies there had been inflated by some of the workers hired by contractors.
…
...it isn't clear whether Young's audit has concluded, reached any findings or prompted any change in America PAC's outreach. Text messages reviewed by Reuters show managers at one Nevada contractor, Lone Mountain Strategies, fretting because they had to fire canvassers who used smartphone apps to disguise their locations and lie about their doorknocking numbers.
"Our auditors keep catching people cheating," one of the messages read. "We've fired two people today and auditors are going around checking doors for flyers."
America PAC is firing people at the same time that its struggling to hire enough canvassers — with just a little over two weeks left in the campaign (!).
Three canvassers, who asked not to be identified, told Reuters the work isn't worth the pay, starting at some contractors at as low as $20 per hour. In some cases, they added, canvassers drive long distances in remote areas and don't get reimbursed for gasoline.
Right now you can visit the America PAC website and find TONS of open positions for canvassers. Reuters notes that the PAC recently updated its website to prominently display ads seeking canvassers. The home page of the website touts that "Pay starts at $30 per hour, with bonuses for performance."
So as we all work hard every day to make sure that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz get elected, we can perhaps take a little more motivation from the fact that the other side doesn’t seem to know what it’s doing. Let’s get this over the finish line everyone!!
UPDATE
The Guardian is out with more details on America PAC’s potentially fake ground game in Arizona and Nevada.
Donald Trump’s campaign may be failing to reach thousands of voters they hope to turn out in Arizona and Nevada, with roughly a quarter of door-knocks done by America Pac flagged by its canvassing app as potentially fraudulent, according to leaked data and people familiar with the matter.
The potentially fake door-knocks — when canvassers falsely claim they visited a home — could present a serious setback to Trump as he and Kamala Harris remain even in the polls with fewer than 20 days to an election that increasingly appears set to be determined by turnout.
Yikes. As just one example of this apparently fake canvassing being reported by America PAC canvassers, the Campaign Sidekick canvassing app showed a canvasser who was marked by GPS as sitting at a “Guayo’s On the Trail” restaurant half a mile away from the doors he was supposedly hitting in Globe, Arizona.
