University of Kwazulu-Natal

The Trump Campaign S Big Bet On A New Gotv Strategy Worries Some

Bonisiwe Shabane
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the trump campaign s big bet on a new gotv strategy worries some

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.” Today for the Washington Monthly, I examine Donald Trump’s eyebrow-raising get-out-the-vote strategy: outsource the job to other groups, chiefly the right-wing Turning Point network. The strategy might make sense if Turning Point had a successful track record in getting out the vote. It does not.

Moreover, it appears that Turning Point got the lucrative gig by convincing Trump to dump Ronna McDaniel as chair of the Republican National Committee and install Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump as co-chair. It looks like a scandal. If I was a Republican, I would be outraged. First, let’s check out what’s leading the Washington Monthly website: Create your free account to see the in-depth bias analytics and more. By creating an account, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy, and subscribe to email updates.

The A.I. bias rating includes policy and politician portrayal leanings based on the author’s tone found in the article using machine learning. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. *Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.

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. 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.

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