Politico mis-titled their story ("alarms raised" and all that) on Trump's get-out-the-vote campaign. I corrected their error, above. But I do hope they got the gist right.
For months we have suffered through dark and stormy days as a terrible spectre hovered over GOTVland. About thrice a week we'd read of meteorological powerhouse super PACs, American Bund organizations, religious fanatics and Elon Musk, too, raining down tens of millions of dollars on a Trump ground game. On Election Day, the other land, the one of the free and generally decent, would be washed from Earth in a torrent of greenbacks.
Now this, from Politico: "Some battleground state Republicans say they’re worried they see little evidence of Donald Trump’s ground game — and fear it could cost him the election in an exceedingly close race.
"In interviews, more than a dozen Republican strategists and operatives in presidential battlegrounds voiced serious concerns about what they described as a paltry get-out-the-vote effort by the Trump campaign, [and] an untested strategy of leaning on outside groups to help do field work. several Republican operatives said they aren’t seeing the same kind of presence either from the Trump campaign itself or from those outside groups that they did during his previous presidential runs, in 2016 and 2020."
The operatives may be misremembering those past efforts, or this year they are indeed seeing less effort, to be addressed momentarily. (I guess they don't remember that Trump lost the popular vote in those other years by a total of 10 million. Whither the admirable GOTV?)
The contemporary shortfalls are easily explained. In that wretched era of the Tea Party, the GOP began ostracizing and dooming businesslike Republican pols and the organizations that helped them. Wingnuts, purists, radio talk-show audiences, snake-handlers and felons began directing the entire political operation. Then they found their bungling messiah in 2015, no Mormons required.
Hence the Republican Party has operated with less business skills than even I have. Of the Trump campaign's training of GOTV people, one operative said "it’s almost like a timeshare scheme. You have to go in and do the training, and you get the swag and the hat and the yard sign. That’s what you have to do to go get it. It doesn’t seem like people are really being activated, and the campaign’s not very forthcoming." Well blow me down.
Firsthand, on-the-ground accounts are enlightening. A Republican strategist in Michigan said "they are out-matching us in money, in enthusiasm and in the ground game." A Nevada operative told Politico "there’s really no organization. He comes out, they scramble to do a rally … but after that, there’s just really nothing else." And in Arizona a consultant mused, "It’s not a good place to go. But it’s logical, given the fact that they’re not giving the other segments of the electorate any place for buy in."
What is the consultant's doubleplusungood "place to go?" Where low- and mid-propensity voters dwell, largely rural, low-income areas. But that's the electorate the Trump campaign is centering its efforts on, seemingly unconcerned about all the higher-propensity voters it has alienated. Observers hanging with higher-income voters, then, aren't seeing all the wonderful things the wizardly Trump can do.
Still, I'll feel better about his strategy once Kamala Harris begins polling above the even mark or plus-2 or 3 points.
Having outsourced their GOTV efforts, I reckon we shouldn't be surprised to see all that cash get diverted to other purposes. It's an easy accounting trick to turn contributions into covering 95% overhead (which essentially involves asking for more money) while leaving only a smidgen for the actual task for which one is ostensibly raising the money in the first place. And since Trump is a past-master at this, he shouldn't be surprised.
Posted by: VoiceOfReason | October 01, 2024 at 12:40 PM
That's what his 2020 campaign manager, Brad Parscale, did to him. Trump was clueless.
Posted by: PM | October 01, 2024 at 12:51 PM