If the margins in battleground states come down to a few thousand votes, the Trump campaign will regret ditching plans to flood them with field offices.
“It all comes down to turnout” is an eye-rolling cliché, but it’s axiomatic for a reason. In a tight race, which every indication suggests the 2024 presidential election most certainly is, the mechanics associated with mobilizing your campaign’s target voters are the whole ballgame. Get-out-the-vote (GOTV) strategies are even more determinative when a campaign is hamstrung by its reliance on either low-propensity or unenthusiastic voters. That fairly describes the Trump campaign, but it also applies to Barack Obama’s reelection bid in 2012. That year, the Obama camp produced the gold standard for GOTV operations.
Following Obama’s victory, CNN reporter Rebecca Sinderbrand outlined the challenges the incumbent’s campaign faced and described how it overcame those obstacles. Democrats faced a difficult environment in which voters resented their economic circumstances and held the incumbent president in low regard. Republicans were markedly more enthusiastic about the upcoming election than their Democratic counterparts, and the head-to-head polling leading up to Election Day suggested the race was a jump ball. To win, Obama’s team needed to turn out not just their diehard supporters but also the marginal voters who eagerly voted for Democrats in 2008 but had since soured on the party’s record in office.
That’s precisely what the Obama campaign managed to do. It did so by establishing local field offices at a rate that outpaced Republicans by two to one or sometimes three to one in the swing states. The Obama campaign amassed hundreds of local staffers via those field offices, and not only political hobbyists who just wanted some free campaign merchandise. Those campaign ambassadors among them generated dozens of voter contacts — not just via phone-banking but in person, and often by directly contacting the same voter many times over the course of the campaign. This allowed them to compile “detailed voter files on potential supporters” and to “field test the best ways to motivate them, and push them to cast their votes weeks before Election Day,” Sinderbrand noted. Pushing the early vote so hard cannibalized Obama’s Election Day vote, but it also freed up resources that would have otherwise been devoted to mobilizing Democratic partisans in the final week of the campaign to driving unlikely voters to the polls.
“The Obama campaign’s superior ground game is a myth,” Republican National Committee political director Rick Wiley wrote at the time. Indeed, the Romney campaign was dismissive of the Obama camp’s field operations. It did not emphasize early voting as much as its Democratic opponents. It outsourced door-knocking operations to outside groups and political action committees, which counted perfunctory initiatives like leaving a flyer on a door handle as a “voter contact” when best practice prescribes face-to-face communication. For all the deserved grief given to the Romney campaign’s disastrous Project ORCA, the 2012 race was likely lost well before Election Day.
So far, the Trump campaign’s state-level GOTV operations resemble Romney’s more than Obama’s. When Trump’s family took control of the Republican National Committee in March, they threw out the party’s plan to flood the swing states with field offices and volunteers. “Those now-discarded plans included 88 staff members and 12 offices, and goals to knock on 3 million doors and make 2.4 million phone calls, in Pennsylvania,” the Washington Post reported. “In Arizona, the RNC’s plan called for 62 staffers and seven offices, aiming for 558,000 voter contacts.” And so on. And like the Romney campaign, the Trump-centric RNC has since outsourced canvasing operations to PACs and outside groups like America First Works, America PAC, and Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point Action.
On Monday, the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell zoomed in on the must-win Keystone State to see how the GOP’s GOTV operation was going. What he found should send chills down Republican spines.
“Republican officials have derisively said the Trump operation is more comparable in size to a midterm cycle than a presidential,” he wrote. While the Trump campaign insists that its battleground state operations outpace the RNC’s 2022 GOTV program (a low hurdle to clear), it still can count only 50 staffers in Pennsylvania compared with the Harris campaign’s 375. Like the Romney campaign, Team Trump is dismissive of the Harris campaign’s ground game, which consists entirely of “fake numbers on a spreadsheet,” according to Trump-camp political director James Blair.
While the Trump campaign’s GOTV apparatus, “Trump Force 47,” focuses on driving up turnout among rural voters — a time-consuming enterprise, given the distance that must be covered in low-density areas of the state — the campaign is counting on PACs to make up the deficit in suburban areas. “They have only started to hire at a rapid clip in recent weeks,” Lowell reported, “meaning they are reaching Trump supporters late in the cycle when it often takes repeated ‘voter contacts’ to get them to return a ballot.”
The Trump campaign has devoted considerable resources to monitoring for and combating alleged efforts to manipulate the vote, often at the expense of efforts to boost absentee and early voting (of which Trump himself is suspicious). The campaign’s failure to “cannibalize” its Election Day vote — which the Romney campaign also pooh-poohed — will compel Trump-team volunteers and campaign professionals to mobilize both partisan and low-propensity voters in the home stretch.
If the ultimate margins in the battleground states come down to a few thousand votes, which isn’t just foreseeable but perhaps likely, a solid GOTV operation makes the difference between victory and defeat. From an organizational perspective, you’d rather be the Harris campaign than Trump’s at this stage of the race.