Donald Trump S Big Get Out The Vote Strategy In Arizona And Vpm

CASA GRANDE, Ariz. — By this point in time, you've almost certainly heard of former President Donald Trump and have thoughts about if you want him to win in this November's election. But as Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley told a crowded room in Casa Grande, Ariz., last week, it takes extra effort to turn those thoughts into ballots for Trump. "You all know somebody that if they vote, they would vote for him … they would vote for President Trump, but they haven't voted in four years or six years or eight years," he... "Low-propensity voters is what we call them — we need to dynamite those people off of their couch." Whatley was at the opening of a Trump Force 47 office in a growing part of Pinal County, about an hour south of Phoenix, touting the party's plan to marshal a volunteer army of...

Trump Force 47 was announced the day after Trump's guilty verdict was announced in his New York hush money trial. It came at a time when Trump and the RNC were struggling to bring in cash, compared to the fundraising hauls reported by President Biden and the Democratic National Committee. Former President Donald Trump’s campaign thinks its new get-out-the-vote strategy will serve as a silver bullet to capture key battleground states. But increasingly concerned Republicans fear the Trump team is firing blanks. The former president’s campaign has unleashed an untested canvassing and voter-contact model that could reap a big payoff if successfully executed. Gone are the days of the Republican National Committee leading the charge and aiming to hit the highest number of contacts possible.

Now, the Trump team is tailoring its effort, carried out in conjunction with outside groups, to be focused primarily on what it has dubbed “low-propensity voters” — the people who are showing up in... Meanwhile, an opinion issued by the Federal Election Commission earlier this year allowed for campaigns and outside groups to work more closely on voter turnout efforts. Though full coordination is not permitted, the ruling allowed for this less-regulated money to play a much bigger role in this space. “The campaign is really rigorously focused on a relatively small but very important group of voters to turn out that are pretty disconnected from politics,” said a senior Trump campaign official who made a... “Traditional field efforts at the RNC had really focused on just volume as much as possible, and that ultimately dictates, operationally, a series of choices where a lot of these folks get missed.” FILE - Former President Donald Trump, right, shakes hands with Turning Point CEO Charlie Kirk before speaking during the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit, Saturday, July 23, 2022, in Tampa, Fla.

(AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack, File) FILE - Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump gestures as he finishes speaking at The Believers’ Summit 2024 at a Turning Point Action event in West Palm Beach, Fla., July 26, 2024. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky, File) WASHINGTON (AP) — Turning Point’s representatives have made two things clear in meetings with state and local Republican leaders — Donald Trump has blessed their conservative organization to help lead his get-out-the-vote effort, and... Both prospects terrify fellow Republicans.

Soaring to prominence after Trump’s unexpected 2016 win, Turning Point earned a reputation for hosting glitzy events, cultivating hard-right influencers and raising prodigious sums of money while enriching the group’s leaders. They’ve had far less success helping Republicans win, especially in their adopted home state of Arizona. I had been walking the streets of suburban Phoenix for hours and barely seen anyone else on foot. One of the few people I did encounter was a man holding a sign that read “I need ice I’m going to get heatsick again.” It was August, approaching a hundred and fifteen degrees,... Angel’s goal was to talk to ten registered Republicans who hadn’t voted in the last Presidential election. There are more than two hundred and thirty thousand such Republicans in Arizona; in 2020, Trump lost the state by roughly eleven thousand votes.

It was the first time a Democratic Presidential candidate won Arizona since Clinton did in 1996. (Before that: Truman, 1948.) Angel was consulting Turning Point Action’s iPhone app, which displayed a map leading us to the closest so-called low-propensity voters—high chance of voting Republican, slim chance of showing up. They were mostly not answering the door. Angel’s knee was screaming in pain, but he wanted to keep going. “I can hardly damn walk,” he said. “I’m going to have to get over to the V.A.”

In 2016, Trump won three battleground states by less than a point; the same was true for Biden in 2020. It didn’t seem unreasonable for Angel to hope that a few encounters at the margin would be worthwhile. During the stretches in between houses, he told me about Diana Walsh Pasulka, a scholar of religious studies who writes about people’s inclination to believe in U.F.O.s. We arrived at a house that looked promising: two cars were in the driveway, one of them a truck with a model of a .50-calibre bullet mounted on its front hood. “This guy’s my people right here,” Angel said. He made sure his veteran baseball cap was visible in the Ring camera.

Then he turned to me and said, “Instead of going out and trying to convert people, let’s talk to folks who are like us.” Earlier this summer, Trump’s ground game had felt like a bit of an afterthought; he was leading Biden in every swing state and by more than seven percentage points in Arizona, according to Nate... Still, there had been some concern in conservative circles that nothing much was happening for Republicans on the ground. In April, Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, the right-wing non-profit with which Turning Point Action is affiliated, lamented that Biden’s campaign was “superior”; on his popular daily talk-radio show, he questioned... “I do not know if we have the infrastructure, if we have the troops, the plumbing, to translate the public sentiment into election success,” he said. When I arrived in Phoenix, the weekend after the Democratic National Convention, Kamala Harris, now atop the ticket, was ahead.

By that point, even Trump’s dependable online sycophant Laura Loomer worried that his campaign was fumbling. (“You need a lot more than just ‘Vibes,’ ” she tweeted. “The ground game is not sufficient.”) In fact, for much of this cycle, neither party invested significantly in ground campaigns. At the end of 2023, Biden had only a tenth as many people on the campaign payroll as Obama had at that point in 2012. (After Harris became the presumptive nominee, in July, a hundred and seventy thousand new Democratic volunteers signed up to help.) The traditional approach to running field operations in a very close race is to...

It has a fraction of the field offices and staff that Harris does, and it has partnered with Turning Point Action and other conservative groups to help execute a ground game that is focussed... (Earlier this year, new guidance from the Federal Election Commission allowed outside groups to work directly with campaigns on get-out-the-vote efforts.) “You’re talking about a race that potentially could be decided by thousands or... “The proverbial voter that lives under a rock and would vote for us if they would just come vote—that’s where contacts are most impactful.” Turning Point Action has raised tens of millions of dollars to fund an army of on-the-ground ballot chasers that it hopes to deploy not just to elect Trump but in perpetuity. “We want this to be the new way to win,” Brett Galaszewski, Turning Point Action’s national enterprise director, told me. “We no longer see this as a war of persuasion amongst swing voters.” He went on, “There’s a turnout problem in the conservative movement.

There are people in this country that would give up their vote for a stick of gum. We’re going after those voters, and we’ve identified enough of them to tip the election.” Chris LaCivita, Trump’s campaign co-director, agreed with this approach. “That’s our entire focus,” he told me. “In the past, the R.N.C. would spend tens of millions of dollars chasing the wrong voters, and we’ve totally revamped it.” The weekend before the presidential election, Kamala Harris’ campaign had some big news to share.

Arizona Democrats had just completed their biggest organizing day ever, knocking on 112,000 doors and making 683,651 phone calls in a single Saturday to boost the vice president’s presidential bid. But just seven days later, Arizona dealt Harris her final defeat on the battleground map when the race was finally called Saturday night for President-elect Donald Trump. Trump outperformed the polls, swept all seven battleground states and won the national popular vote. He roared back in Arizona, too, putting an end to Democrats’ statewide winning streak and testing the limits of how effective the traditional campaign ground game really is in a presidential contest. “Clearly we weren't anywhere near the territory we needed for it to have mattered,” said D.J. Quinlan, a former executive director of the Arizona Democratic Party.

Former President Donald Trump has largely been absent in Arizona — limited staffing and no advertisements. On Thursday, he returned to the Grand Canyon state after nearly two years to back up on-the-ground organizing from outside groups. On Thursday, Trump held a town hall event sponsored by Turning Point Action, which focuses on mobilizing young conservatives, at Dream City Church in Phoenix. To a chanting crowd of thousands, Trump vowed to make his voter mobilization efforts this cycle “too big to rig.” This is a nod at his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen. Those false claims began in Arizona.

And the state really became the center for election denialism theories and claims. The event also underscores a new campaign tactic: directly using outside organizations to lead canvassing efforts to turn out voters. Trump’s presence in the state, his first this cycle, is seen as an endorsement of Turning Point’s new “Chase the Vote” initiative. The townhall also comes days after the trump campaign and the Republican National Committee announced a “Swamp the Vote” initiative that promotes early and mail-in voting. “We are going to make November too big to rig and we are going to overwhelm the ballot boxes,” said Charlie Kirk, the founder and executive director of Turning Point USA, during the event... White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt attempted to justify the destruction of the White House by claiming Americans had actually voted for it.

Speaking on Fox News’s Jesse Watters Primetime Tuesday, Leavitt tried to douse fires sparked by viral photographs of a shredded East Wing, claiming that this was exactly what people liked about Donald Trump in... “He is the builder in chief,” Leavitt said. “In large part, he was reelected back to this people’s house because he is good at building things. He has done it his entire life, his entire career.” She noted that the East Wing of the White House would be “more modern and beautiful than ever,” and again touted the 90,000-square-foot ballroom Trump had claimed in July would not “interfere with the... But the Trump administration knows it has a massive problem.

The Treasury Department, which sits across from the East Wing, sent a message to federal employees Monday evening asking them to stop taking photos of the gaping hole in the side of the building.

People Also Search

• Donald Trump's big get-out-the-vote strategy in Arizona and ... - VPM
• Donald Trump's unique get-out-the-vote strategy raises concerns
• The Trump campaign's big bet on a new GOTV strategy worries some ...
• Many Republicans are skeptical of Turning Point's ability to get out ...
• Inside the Trump Campaign's Plan to Win Arizona - The New Yorker
• Trump's Get Out the Vote Plan Is Unusual—and It Just Might Work - WIRED
• A Pro-Trump Group's Risky Bet on Infrequent ... - The New York Times
• Here's why Trump won AZ despite Harris' ground game
• After two years, Trump returns to Arizona with a new partner in ... - VPM
• Karoline Leavitt Claims People Want Trump to Destroy White House