On the menu today: You’ve probably heard the reports doubting the Trump campaign’s strategy of effectively outsourcing its get-out-the-vote operations to Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point Action and Elon Musk’s America PAC. Look hard, and you can find reports wondering if the groups’ staffers are actually knocking on all the doors that they claim to be knocking on, or if they’re inflating the numbers. Why is Trump, a man with arguably the most devoted and impassioned fanbase in American politics, relying on a bunch of mercenaries for this make-or-break aspect of his campaign? Meanwhile, the Democrats have a billion dollars to play with and are talking about distributing “street money” in Philadelphia. Read on.
Crunch Time for Canvassers
It’s the make-or-break question of the presidential election: Is the Republican get-out-the-vote operation, largely outsourced to independent organizations like Turning Point Action and Elon Musk’s America PAC, going to get the job done?
To hear Turning Point Action’s Tyler Bowyer boasting to Breitbart News’ Matt Boyle, everything is going gangbusters, and the group’s superlative effort represents one of the most underreported stories of the cycle:
In Arizona, he said “we’re outpacing, as of yesterday, the Democrats about four to one in low propensity votes that have been turned in. Most of those people are never voted or have neglected to vote in the past. That is unheard of, that is that is not happening in any other state in the country.”
He said in 2020 “when we were about 19 or 20 days out, the Republicans were about 20 percent down in early turn in compared to Democrats in early vote. As of today we are 10 percent, yesterday we were 12 percent ahead of where the Democrats are. We’re well over a pretty close to 30-point swing in percentage of turnout from 2020.”
Bowyer calls those numbers “disastrous” for Democrats, telling Boyle that “the most unreported, untold story so far in this election is that Democrats are more than double-digits down in almost every state. But in Arizona, they’re closer to 25-30 points down from where they were in 2020. That is a huge swing.”
As of October 21, the most recent date for which statistics are available, more than 288,000 registered Republicans have voted early in Arizona, while about 250,000 registered Democrats have voted, and 150,000 registered with no party or a third party have voted — a GOP lead of 41.9 percent to 36.3 percent. (As always, these numbers are only telling us what party a voter is registered with, and are not an indication of a vote for Trump or Harris. With that said, the overwhelming majority of registered Republicans will vote for Trump, and the overwhelming majority of registered Democrats will vote for Harris.)
But you don’t have to look far to find other Republicans who fear the outside groups are stumbling when they’re needed most, and perhaps rife with paid workers who are claiming to have contacted voters when they never did.
The Wall Street Journal, October 17:
That group, the organizing arm of Turning Point USA, founded by the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, has GOP operatives particularly worried. Some Republicans in such places as Wisconsin and Arizona have said they aren’t seeing Turning Point Action make much progress, an allegation the group rejects, arguing its work transcends the traditional GOP model.
A GOP operative in Michigan said the Trump campaign is knocking on one-tenth of the doors it did in 2016, though a Republican National Committee official said the campaign’s efforts have yielded five times as many Michiganders committed to voting for Trump this year as in 2016.
“Trump volunteers are just a different breed compared to your traditional breed of Republican volunteers,” said the operative, who works on GOP races. “Their idea of volunteering is doing a sign waving or a boat parade.”
That Journal article reported that America PAC “has fired vendors on two separate occasions in the final months before the election. America PAC at one point paid its door knockers $30 for each door, according to people familiar with the matter. That is an exorbitant amount for such work, which more typically is closer to single digits for each door, people close to the industry said.”
A day later, Reuters offered a troubling report about America PAC:
Four people involved in the group’s outreach told Reuters that managers warned canvassers they are missing targets and needed to raise the number of would-be voters they contact.
Alysia McMillan, who canvassed for the PAC in Wisconsin, said field organizers recently told campaigners there they weren’t reaching daily objectives and were on track to miss an ultimate goal of contacting 450,000 voters by Election Day. In one meeting with canvassers, recorded by McMillan and reviewed by Reuters, a manager warned of the shortfall.
“We’re not going to hit 450,000, not with what we’ve got now,” the manager said in the Oct. 8 meeting. It isn’t clear how many knocks the Wisconsin teams have reached so far. . . .
One canvassing manager in Arizona said leaders there had issued similar warnings. Three other people familiar with the outreach told Reuters that Chris Young, a Musk aide and longtime Republican operative, had recently traveled to Nevada to audit whether door knocking tallies there had been inflated by some of the workers hired by contractors. Another person briefed on the matter said America PAC was struggling to find sufficient people to conduct audits in other states.
Two Washington Post reporters walked with an America PAC door knocker in New Berlin, Wis., and described the difficulties on that day:
As she prepared to knock on her first door of the day, Alysia McMillan switched her red MAGA hat for a white one that read simply: AMERICA. It was part of the uniform issued by America PAC, a super PAC formed by billionaire Elon Musk to campaign for former president Donald Trump.
McMillan, one of hundreds of canvassers working on behalf of America PAC to turn out Trump voters in battleground states, was setting out for a full day’s work in this Wisconsin suburb. But three hours and about 30 doors later on a warm October afternoon, the 31-year-old was getting discouraged.
The mobile app she used to map her route and know which homes she should visit kept glitching. Several times it directed her to knock on the door of a house with blue lawn signs endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris. Most of her knocks so far that day had received no response, and the few voters who answered were either undecided, or uninterested in talking. . . .
One of the apps canvassers working for the super PAC rely on requires cell service to operate, she said, causing holdups in rural areas with low connectivity. McMillan said she would sometimes abandon the planned route or pick houses to visit herself.
(Are you having ORCA flashbacks? Some of us are having ORCA flashbacks.)
Then, on October 19, the Guardian newspaper reported that there was doubt within America PAC about its internal numbers of how many voters had been contacted:
But leaked America Pac data obtained by the Guardian shows that roughly 24% of the door-knocks in Arizona and 25% of the door-knocks in Nevada this week were flagged under its internal “unusual survey logs”, a metric used to determine faked doors.
The Arizona data, for example, shows that out of 35,692 doors hit by 442 canvassers working for Blitz Canvassing in the America Pac operation on Wednesday, 8,511 doors were flagged under the unusual survey logs.
The extent of the flagged doors in America Pac’s operation underscores the risk of outsourcing a ground-game program, where paid canvassers are typically not as invested in their candidate’s victory compared with volunteers or campaign staff.
America Pac denied it was experiencing that level of actual fraud in Arizona and Nevada and declined to comment on reporting for this story.
The article described how “one canvasser was terminated for blatant fraud only after he had worked for five days and supposedly hit 796 doors — with every single one flagged as suspicious.” America PAC’s vendors — Blitz Canvassing, Echo Canyon, Synapse Group, Patriot Grassroots, and Campaign Sidekick — issued a statement to the Guardian claiming that, “We are fully confident in the authenticity of our door counts thanks to the rigorous auditing infrastructure each canvassing firm deploys to supplement Campaign Sidekick’s strong capabilities, and we are on pace to exceed every single one of our door goals.”
There was also this detail in the Reuters report:
Text messages reviewed by Reuters show managers at one Nevada contractor, Lone Mountain Strategies, fretting because they had to fire canvassers who used smartphone apps to disguise their locations and lie about their doorknocking numbers.
“Our auditors keep catching people cheating,” one of the messages read. “We’ve fired two people today and auditors are going around checking doors for flyers.”
You can imagine campaign managers feeling like an exasperated parent: Why are you putting effort into disguising your location, instead of putting effort into doing the job you were actually hired to do?
If an organization pays people for a stack of forms indicating they’ve contacted a voter, it will get in return lots of stacks of forms of contacted voters, which may not align with actual voters contacted. It’s like when the British government put a bounty on every dead cobra snake turned in in Delhi. Initially, people started killing cobras and collecting the reward . . . and then they started breeding cobras to collect more money.
I was reminded of this exchange from The Godfather II:
Michael Corleone: I saw a strange thing today. Some rebels were being arrested. One of them pulled the pin on a grenade. He took himself and the captain of the command with him. Now, soldiers are paid to fight; the rebels aren’t.
Hyman Roth: What does that tell you?
Michael Corleone: They could win.
A volunteer door knocker is out there because they believe in the candidate and the cause. At least some paid workers are out there just because they want to collect a paycheck. If Harris wins the presidency, Trump-world and the GOP will erupt in an earthquake of finger-pointing. A fair question will be why the candidate who can pack tens of thousands of super-fans into an arena for a rally was relying on the political equivalent of mercenaries instead of true believers for the imperative duty of getting out the vote.
As for the Democrats, let’s begin with the fact that the Harris campaign raised more than a billion dollars in three months. The Democratic get-out-the-vote effort is awash in money, which makes life a lot easier. You may see internal squabbling about who is getting how much money when and where, but the Harris campaign is rarely going to say the words, “We just can’t afford it.” So, for example, it absolutely makes sense for Harris to compete for Maine’s second congressional district, which Trump has won twice. She’s got the money, and it’s not like any other key state will get short-changed:
Both parties are spending money in Maine, though not a lot. Democrats have outspent Republicans on presidential advertising there, but neither party has made major investments in ads, according to AdImpact, which tracks campaign spending. Democrats have about $150,000 invested in Maine’s two media markets for the presidential race, while Republicans have closer to $125,000. Most of that spending is on digital ads in the Portland-Auburn media market, which includes parts of both the 1st and 2nd districts.
The Trump campaign has actually outspent Harris by a roughly 2-to-1 margin in the race, but her campaign has been boosted by more than $96,000 in advertising by the One for All Committee, an outside group.
But if you listen closely, you can also hear some rattles in the Democrats’ get-out-the-vote machine.
The Philadelphia Inquirer followed up on that Politico story about disorganization in the Harris campaign’s efforts in Pennsylvania. The rivalry between the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia branches of the state Democratic Party is intense, with the Philadelphia contingent convinced it’s getting the short end of the stick and is insufficiently consulted on strategy. And then there are moves like this:
[Philadelphia mayor Cherelle L.] Parker has also used the presidential race to raise money for her own campaign, despite not facing reelection until 2027. On at least four occasions, Parker’s campaign emailed supporters about the presidential election and asked them to contribute, including a Monday missive that asked for help fighting “back against the dangerous Trump-Vance agenda and the wave of racist attacks we know they’ve been hurling towards Kamala Harris.”
The “donate” link yielded a page to contribute to Parker’s campaign, rather than Harris’.
“Donate to my 2027 reelection campaign to help Harris now” is an . . . unorthodox pitch.
That Inquirer article quoted Bob Brady, the longtime chair of the Democratic City Committee, saying, “The Harris campaign has agreed to help fund ‘street money’ — the small cash payments to the party’s thousands of committee people who work to get out the vote on Election Day — but not as much as he had requested.” This morning, the Inquirer quotes Brady as saying he’s asking the Harris campaign for $1.2 million in “street money,” emphasizing, “despite the ominous name, street money is not cash that gets paid to individual voters. Instead, it’s more like money for some last-minute paid canvassing.”
And the Washington Post reports, “Democratic groups have started paying at least $160 to more than 75,000 voters who agree to contact dozens of their friends and relatives with requests to support Kamala Harris”:
“We are registering tens of thousands of voters, signing up tens of thousands to vote by mail, and we are maximizing early vote,” said Kevin Mack, whose tax-deductible nonprofit, the Voter Project, created the comic book and has tried to juice voting by giving away $1,000 Target gift cards, $2,000 rent checks and $10,000 grants to community groups around the Democratic-heavy neighborhoods of Philadelphia. “At the end of the day, the combined efforts will increase youth turnout in Pennsylvania by over 100,000 people.”
Who says your vote doesn’t matter and isn’t worth anything? You should think of your vote the way former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich saw Barack Obama’s Senate seat: “a . . . valuable thing, you just don’t give it away for nothing.”
ADDENDUM: As of midday Tuesday, at least 19.2 million people have voted in the 2024 general election, according to the University of Florida Election Lab’s early voter tracker — 4.4 million registered Democrats have voted, 3.3 million registered Republicans have voted, and 2.1 million registered with no party or a third party have voted. (Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, West Virginia, and Wyoming report party-registration data.)
It is worth keeping in mind that Democrats traditionally win the early vote by a wide margin.