University of Kwazulu-Natal

Trump S Gotv Plan Looks Scandalous Republicans Should Be Outraged

Bonisiwe Shabane
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trump s gotv plan looks scandalous republicans should be outraged

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: 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.” Mark Joseph Stern has more on Trump using the Citizens United non-coordinated (:):):):):):)) spending loophole to outsource his GOTV operations, which has one clear historical precedent: Citizens United reasoned that this spending would not corrupt politicians because it was “not coordinated with a candidate,” but undertaken apart from the campaign.

Since then, however, the Federal Election Commission has steadily weakened federal rules against super PACs “coordinating” with campaigns directly. Most recently, the commission allowed super PACs to coordinate with campaigns to plan and implement canvassing operations. The Trump campaign has seized on that decision to outsource much of its door-knocking work to super PACs—including to Elon Musk’s America PAC. Musk has plowed $75 million into America PAC already and positioned it as, in effect, the canvassing arm of the Trump campaign. The Republican National Committee and GOP state parties have pulled back from get-out-the-vote operations, ceding much of the work to super PACs. It is reportedly not going as planned.

Traditional campaigns rely on paid staff to put together a small army of volunteers, who use various records, like voter registration, to identify and contact potential supporters. Pro-Trump super PACs, by contrast, are simply paying people to knock on doors, usually between $20 to $40 an hour. Musk has rolled out a glitchy app that’s supposed to steer canvassers toward “low propensity voters” who may lean toward Trump. As the Washington Post reported, however, the app struggles in “rural areas with low connectivity,” precisely where many of these Trump voters live. Reuters has reported that canvassers have fallen well short of their goals, persistently missing their assigned targets in swing states. A Guardian report identified rampant fraud in the operation, with as many as a quarter of alleged “door knocks” in two states marked as fakes.

As the Guardian pointed out, though, the vendors paid to coordinate canvassing have a disincentive to sniff out fake door knocks, because they themselves get paid “by the door.” If they discover that their... (America PAC has already fired two vendors.) To all the great patriots taking Elon’s money and refusing to plow his driveway — we salute you. Republican advisers reportedly warned Musk that he could not put together an effective get-out-the-vote operation so soon before the election, pointing out that hiring and training effective canvassers took more time than he had. Musk ignored them, and now Trump’s ground operations are in serious distress. The absence of guidance and leadership from the campaign has also left state and local Republican parties infighting over their own small-scale efforts to get voters to the polls.

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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. Republicans should consider how they balance highlighting their “election integrity” effort, which seeks to deploy thousands of poll watchers and attorneys, with their GOTV push in the final weeks of the campaign. That’s because many low-propensity GOP voters, who have heard consistent negative messaging from former President Trump about the vote-by-mail (VBM) process, likely end up forgoing early vote options altogether. That leaves all the pressure to get them out to the polls left to Election Day itself. “They’re low-propensity for a reason,” Rick Wiley, a partner at GOP firm Black Diamond Strategies, recently told C&E.

“On our side of the aisle, we don’t trust the post office either so people are going to start to say, ‘I can’t put that ballot in the mail because the post office won’t... “It’s been a problem for a couple cycles now.” Wiley joins a chorus of GOP voices who have urged their party to take a different approach to GOTV and VBM — especially with so many races and states set to be decided by... “Moving forward, something has to change,” he said. “It’s becoming a problem. You have to use all of the tools available to you to turn out voters… We take some of that off the field.”

Now, the national party committees typically play an outsized role during GOTV season. But Wiley noted that while the RNC is focused on its “election integrity” effort, the Harris-Walz ticket, which recently surpassed the $1 billion mark in its fundraising, is moving money down-ballot to the tune... Sign up for Semafor Washington, DC: What the White House is reading. Read it now. The last time one party tried cramming all of its priorities into one bill was four years ago, when the Democratic “Build Back Better” plan sank under its own weight. Some Republicans are starting to worry that their own BBB — President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” — could face the same fate.

One week away from a possible House floor vote, the GOP’s massive tax and spending bill is facing opposition from enough lawmakers to defeat it and criticism from senators eager to rewrite it. The party doesn’t have to look back far for its nightmare scenario. Former President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better proposal passed the House only to collapse in the Senate and ultimately become a far more modest law than its trillion-dollar-plus price tag. Every national and battleground state poll shows a statistical dead heat, with neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump holding a lead outside the margin of error. Many factors could determine the outcome of a race this close. One of those factors is the relative strength of the competing campaigns’ get-out-the-vote [GOTV] operations.

Door-knocking and phone-banking efforts rarely move the needle much. lan Gerber & Gregory A. Huber, Yale University political scientists, concluded that “if a typical canvassing campaign manages to interact with 25 percent of its targets, then the overall effect on the target group’s turnout is 1 percentage point... All available evidence indicates that Harris did that and Trump did not. In June, I wrote that Donald Trump’s Get-Out-The-Vote Plan is Bonkers. Here’s the short version.

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