Political conventional wisdom says that a good field operation is worth around 3 percentage points. In a tied race, the importance of getting out one’s voters becomes that much more critical. Yet while Democrats continue to build a robust field program, Republicans have failed to follow.
And now they’re starting to notice.
Literally the first thing Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump did after the former president’s takeover of the Republican National Committee in late April was fire everyone in its field operation, and scrap plans to open 40 field offices in the battleground states. The Washington Post further reported in August, that “Those now-discarded plans included 88 staff members and 12 offices, and goals to knock on 3 million doors and make 2.4 million phone calls, in Pennsylvania. In Arizona, the RNC’s plan called for 62 staffers and seven offices, aiming for 558,000 voter contacts.”
Field wasn’t glamorous enough for Trump, who would rather spend that money on his legal bills and his quixotic “voter integrity” effort, still pretending that he lost the 2020 election to some mythical fraud.
Former President Donald Trump, shakes hands with Turning Point CEO Charlie Kirk before speaking during the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit, July 23, 2022.
By June, the party hadn’t made any new moves to open up any offices. Instead, it had effectively ceded its ground game to right-wing activist Charlie Kirk and his Turning Point USA operation.
It was the griftiest of decisions, handing the plum and lucrative assignment to Kirk, a strong Trump ally. The decision was curious given that Turning Point USA’s only GOTV experience was Arizona’s midterm election in 2022, in which Democrats won the biggest races on the ballot—the governorship, Senate seat, secretary of state, and attorney general. Republicans held on to their razor-thin legislative majorities, but didn’t make any gains. And of course, this was in a midterm election with the Democrats holding the White House, historically a prime opportunity for the “out” party to make gains at all levels of government.
So naturally, given those Arizona 2022 failures, Trump handed the keys to his reelection to Kirk.
There has been scant information on Republican field offices since. The Trump campaign doesn’t have anything to brag about. The Washington Post story linked above gives the contours of Trump’s GOTV operation: “The campaign’s own field operations are using the same formula that carried Trump to victory in the Iowa caucuses, relying on dedicated volunteers serving as neighborhood captains. Under the banner of ‘Trump Force 47,’ the campaign is collecting volunteers in key places and assigning them lists of 10 neighbors to personally mobilize.” The Trump campaign refused to disclose how many such volunteers it had.
“By contrast, the Harris campaign and allied outside groups said they are not changing their approach in response to the FEC decision,” reported The Washington Post. “The campaign said it has 1,300 staff members (including party payrolls) and 250 offices in battleground states organizing events, trainings, door-knocking, phone calls and online peer messaging. It recruited 170,000 new volunteers who signed up since President Biden withdrew in July and held 2,300 events in swing states last weekend to mark 100 days to the election.”
When a campaign has good news to report, it isn’t shy about bragging about it.
Seeing the dysfunction at GOP HQ, Republican groups decided in early August that they wanted in on the grift.
“Everyone sees the marketplace here,” a “prominent” Republican told The Washington Post. “Everyone sees the [Trump] campaign isn’t doing it, and there is a huge opportunity.” As a rule, it’s probably not a good sign when your team is motivated by cash from “a huge (market) opportunity,” as opposed to an ideological imperative to win the election.
Fast forward another month: It’s now September and we get yet another story about the GOP’s lack of ground game.
“The Republican National Committee (RNC) once envisioned an extensive field operation for the 2024 election, including having about 90 staffers in the must-win state of Pennsylvania,” reported The Guardian. “But the Trump campaign scrapped those plans when it took over the RNC in March, redirecting the focus on field operations to combating supposed voter fraud and pursuing a twin voter turnout strategy of relying on several political action committees and ardent Trump volunteers.”
The Trump campaign still refuses to give exact numbers, but claims they have a larger field operation than in 2022, when they had 350 staffers nationwide, and 50 in Pennsylvania. The Harris campaign currently has 375 staffers in Pennsylvania alone—more than Trump has on the entire map.
As for Turning Point USA?
“But the Pacs, which are supposed to [be] bridging the gap, have been slow to spool up, according to people with direct access to the data for groups like America Pac, Turnout for America, Turning Point Action and America First Works,” The Guardian reported. “They have only started to hire at a rapid clip in recent weeks, the people said, meaning they are reaching Trump supporters late in the cycle when it often takes repeated voter contacts’ to get them to return a ballot.”
According to The Guardian, the slow rollout from those allied groups has forced the RNC to “boost its own paid staff in battleground states and has leaned more heavily into the Trump Force 47 captains program, reducing their reliance on the Pacs.” That assertion is sourced to a “Trump official.” It sounds more like bullshit spin than anything.
“Republican officials have been wary of the program, sniping that they saw the volunteers as being as incentivized to rush through the process simply to get the hats as any other get-out-the-vote scheme, noting the turnout for Trump in the primaries was not particularly high,” reported The Guardian. We know that Trump underperformed his poll numbers in the primary, so bragging about his primary GOTV is immediately suspect.
It’s impossible to objectively gauge the relative effectiveness of the field operations, but if a good field program is worth 3 points, and Trump’s is more akin to a midterm election (as claimed in The Guardian article), even a 1 to 1.5-point advantage could very well spell the difference between winning and losing this November.
That may not be, by itself, determinative to the election’s results, but it’s yet another self-inflicted wound that Trump has working against him.
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