University of Kwazulu-Natal

Donald Trump S Unique Get Out The Vote Strategy Raises Concerns

Bonisiwe Shabane
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donald trump s unique get out the vote strategy raises concerns

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.” All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. Learn more.

Less than an hour before JD Vance and Tim Walz took the debate stage on Tuesday, Elon Musk hit pause on his usual shitposting of pro-Trump memes to send a more serious message to... “If you live in Pennsylvania and haven’t registered to vote, you only have 20 days left to do so!” he posted. “Arizona’s voter registration deadline is only a week away!” he said in a second post a few minutes later. Musk also included voter registration links for residents. By Wednesday morning, X’s metrics showed that those posts were viewed more than 30 million times, and the links received 1 million views each. Basically: A lot of people saw them.

A lot. Republican use of technology to get infrequent conservative voters to the polls helped elect President Donald Trump in November and the GOP is gearing up to make greater use of it in 2026, a... A Democratic expert on voter data says the approach being used by 10xVotes is the way of the future for "get out the vote" efforts and no similar system is currently in use by... Drew Born, a co-founder of 10xVotes, which was a corporate sponsor of the GOP convention Saturday at Huntington Place, said the system uses data to help party activists — like those who attend conventions... "We have identified less-dependable voters throughout the state, and we want to give you access to this valuable intelligence," the company says on its website. Born said there are 1.7 million Michigan conservatives who are considered "low-propensity voters" and "it's on us" to get them to the polls.

"We're just getting started," he told the crowd. Presidential campaigns usually run their get-out-the-vote operations using campaign staff and volunteers. But in this election cycle, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign made a big and risky gamble: outsourcing the bulk of its ground game to America PAC, an outside group founded by tech titan Elon Musk. That move followed the Federal Election Commission’s decision to allow campaigns, for the first time, to work more closely with outside groups on GOTV operations. That gamble appears to not be paying off. Reuters reports that, according to people involved in America PAC’s efforts, the group “is struggling in some swing states to meet door-knocking goals and is investigating claims that some canvassers lied about the number...

(According to The Guardian, the Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment and “America Pac denied it was experiencing that level of actual fraud in Arizona and Nevada and declined to comment... Trump's rally strategy is approaching the level of self-sabotage. The Trump campaign appears to be incurring the costs of bucking common-sense strategies for voter turnout operations. Usually, a campaign would want to go the proven route of working with state parties and their regional field operations and avoid delegating critical work to networks of outside organizations. Trump’s potential own goal on voter turnout is hardly an isolated misjudgment. In recent weeks the Trump’s campaign’s decision-making has appeared to be shockingly irrational and disorganized.

With these missteps, Trump could be blowing his chances of winning the election. And if he were to win, then those missteps provide a preview of a Trump term that would be even more chaotic and incompetent than the first one. 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. We are in an era of nail-biter presidential elections. In 2020, Joe Biden won three states by less than a percentage point, including Wisconsin, the state that notched him an Electoral College victory.

In 2016, that exact statement applied to Donald Trump. Polls today suggest 2024 will be similarly close. The get-out-the-vote operations, the so-called “ground game,” may determine the outcome in November. This is why it’s bonkers that the Trump campaign has outsourced its ground game to far-right operators with no track record of success. CNN reported that “Donald Trump’s campaign is taking a vastly different approach to 2024 compared with 2020, with plans for fewer staff and expenses [and instead] relying on wealthy conservative groups for data, infrastructure,... Turning Point USA is a right-wing student group founded in 2012 by Charlie Kirk, an 18-year-old soon-to-be college dropout, and Bill Montgomery, an elderly Tea Party activist.

Kirk adopted confrontational tactics to put his group on the map, such as “Professor Watchlist,” in which Turning Point attacked college professors for their politics and, in the words of one target, stirred up... In the weeks leading up to the November election, many articles were written about the seeming strength of the Harris campaign compared to Trump’s. Reuters reported that Harris spent $270 million in September alone, compared to Trump’s $78 million. The New York Times reported that Harris had the biggest fundraising quarter in history, while Trump was raising significantly less than during his 2020 run. Numerous headlines also touted Harris’ ground game advantage, ad buy edge, and her many celebrity endorsements. Many Democrats were shocked by Kamala Harris’ loss.

She was, as far as they could tell, doing all the things needed to win. Yet it turns out they were looking at the wrong signals. Donald Trump’s victory has a lot to teach us about his remarkable coalition, the country itself, and what really matters in political campaigns. First, Trump’s win is a reminder that campaigns are about the issues voters care about — and in the case of the 2024 election, those were the economy, inflation, and immigration. A candidate cannot seek to avoid taking positions or flip-flopping on the issues that matter to Americans, as Harris seemed to be doing in the eyes of many voters. In contrast, while a lot of Americans didn’t agree with everything Trump said or did, they knew where he stood, viewed him as someone who had the courage of his convictions, and perceived him...

Second, campaigns are about the candidates. The best “ground game” on earth is simply a candidate people want to vote for. Kamala Harris failed to convince enough Americans that she would make their lives better, and no amount of door-knocking or phone-banking was going to change that.

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