Republicans are starting to raise alarms about Trump’s ground game

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, an untested strategy of leaning on outside groups to help do field work and a top-of-the-ticket strategy that’s disjointed from the one Republicans down the ballot are running.

After years of attempts to mimic Democrats’ Barack Obama-era grassroots organizing model, the GOP is still trying to develop a ground game strategy that can rival their opponents’. And as Harris continues to pour money into her door-to-door efforts, some of the strategists and operatives fear the party’s efforts this year will fall short — potentially hampering Trump in key battlegrounds.

“The question in my mind is, are they all singing from the same sheet of music, and is there that strong, extensive, well-funded machine at the top of the ticket?” said Stephen Lawson, a Republican operative in Georgia. “I think that’s a central question heading into early voting next month.”

A Michigan-based GOP strategist, granted anonymity to speak candidly, described the party’s challenge bluntly: “They are out-matching us in money, in enthusiasm and in the ground game.”

Campaign ground games — which include door-knocking and ballot-chasing efforts organized by the campaign and outside groups — can be make-or-break in close elections. And it’s not as though the Trump campaign is doing nothing. To help milk votes in competitive states, his campaign has marshaled a volunteer army of door-knockers and phone-callers it’s referring to as “Trump Force 47,” made up of 30,000 specially trained area captains and “hundreds of thousands” of other volunteers focused on getting out the vote, a Trump campaign official, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the campaign’s plans, told POLITICO.

And aided by a Federal Election Commission decision earlier this year allowing super PACs and other outside groups to coordinate with campaigns on voter turnout strategy, Trump’s campaign is also relying on the work of outside groups to reach a goal of knocking on at least 15 million doors, the Trump campaign official said. While Trump’s team is receiving help from a number of conservative groups carrying out get-out-the-vote operations, organizations like Elon Musk’s America PAC, Turnout for America, America First Works, Turning Point Action and Pennsylvania Chase are among the group’s they’re working particularly closely with.

But 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. Down-ballot candidates for state legislature in some battleground states aren’t running into Trump canvassers at the doors or seeing the campaign’s literature left behind the way they used to, they added.

One GOP operative in a battleground state, who like others was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the state of the race, cast doubt on whether the Trump Force 47 program is actually putting its recruits to work.

“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,” the operative said. “It doesn’t seem like people are really being activated, and the campaign’s not very forthcoming on whether they’ve been activated.”

Both the Trump campaign and outside groups say it makes sense that battleground Republicans may not be seeing their work because they are trying to reach low- and mid-propensity voters. That means spending less time than before in the dense, high-turnout suburban areas where the swing voters “need more persuasion attention and less turnout attention,” said James Blair, Trump’s political director.

“We’ve really worked hard to mobilize the infrequent or occasional Trump-inclined or anti-Harris voter that’s pretty disconnected from politics, a little bit off the grid, not contacted by campaigns regularly,” Blair told POLITICO. “And that often means they skew more rural or exurban, live in less dense areas, lower income areas, are newer to voting. And sometimes that means there’s less frequency and less visibility in areas that plugged-in politicos who talk to media are used to.”

 person familiar with the outside effort, granted anonymity to speak candidly about their work, put it this way: “For those not seeing canvassers in traditional places the answer is, ‘No duh, we’re not running a traditional program.’”

Outside groups also say their work with the Trump campaign is more effective than past Republican National Committee get-out-the-vote efforts, allowing the campaign to focus dollars on things like ads and candidate travel. Some of the groups, like America PAC, are blanketing the country, while others, like Turning Point, are zeroing on particular states — in their case, focusing on Arizona and Wisconsin.

“The preliminary data that we have shows that our efforts are massively successful. I totally disagree with the premise that something is wrong,” said Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for Turning Point Action.

Turning Point, affiliated with the influential and controversial activist and commentator Charlie Kirk, has been the most vocal of the outside groups on the right about its ground program, which is targeting low-propensity conservative voters: those who support Trump but didn’t participate in one or both of the last two presidential elections. Kolvet declined to say how many full-time staff the group employs but said it has added more than 200 new full-time staff in Arizona and Wisconsin in the last couple weeks and is covering hotel costs for volunteers who relocate to help door knock during early voting.

Ralph Reed, founder of the Faith and Freedom Coalition focused on reaching evangelical voters — a quarter of whom infrequently vote — said they will have 10,000 people working on their door-knocking and phone-calling program, roughly half of which will be paid. He said the coalition, in addition to efforts in other states, has 238 paid staff in Pennsylvania, 181 in Georgia, and hundreds more volunteers in each.

Nor are Democrats without their challenges. They are still rebuilding their on-the-ground operation after the Covid-19 pandemic wiped out much of the party’s infrastructure in 2020 and President Joe Biden’s campaign failed to invigorate volunteers earlier in this election cycle. The Harris campaign, in the first five days after she took over the ticket, saw more than 170,000 new volunteers sign up and held more than 2,300 events in battleground states.

“Nobody wanted to talk about Joe Biden at the doors, so now, they’re trying to do this quickly and that’s hard, going from zero to one hundred,” said one national Democratic strategist, granted anonymity to discuss the issue candidly. “The campaign is making up for lost time, and so much money was slower to get into the field because of Biden, so everyone’s still catching up.”

Another Democratic operative who works in field operations also raised concerns that advocacy groups not tied to campaigns are still “very underfunded.”

“Across the board, groups are feeling the pinch,” the operative continued. “The amount you would pay for a canvasser is much higher than it was four years ago. Everything costs more than it did four years ago.”

But the Harris campaign, for its part, has the money it needs to pour into any remaining infrastructure needs. A campaign aide, granted anonymity to speak about internal campaign dynamics, said the campaign had 238 offices and roughly 1,750 staff in battleground states as of Wednesday. And the record fundraising hauls Harris has brought in — raising $310 million in July, including $200 million in the first week after she replaced Biden — has allowed the campaign to pour additional resources into its ground game, including 418 staff and 30 offices in the last month.

In the state with its smallest operation, Nevada, the Harris campaign has 142 staffers; a Republican operative who claimed to be familiar with the Trump team’s staffing level said there were only 16 campaign staff in Nevada, a figure a Trump official disputed, saying the number was “significantly” higher while declining to share specifics. The Trump official also did not say how many full-time staff are involved in their largely volunteer-driven Trump Force 47 program, but said there are “hundreds” of paid staff in more than 300 offices across the battleground states.

And the outside groups aiming to help Trump have their own challenges. Elon Musk’s group, which is in all seven battleground states, has twice this summer cut ties with canvassing firms it had hired to knock hundreds of thousands of doors, according to the New York Times. (The PAC declined to share how many doors it has knocked, but reports from the FEC show that it had poured more than $72 million into independent expenditures, including nearly $46 million into canvassing and field operations, as of Wednesday.)

And some veteran political operatives have been critical of the overall focus on low-propensity voters.

“I just don’t think there’s a lot of juice in those oranges. It’s not a good place to go,” said Chuck Coughlin, a political consultant in Arizona who left the Republican Party under Trump. “But it’s logical, given the fact that they’re not giving the other segments of the electorate any place for buy in.”

In Nevada, where Republicans have long envied Democrats’ storied “Reid machine,” GOP operatives are particularly frustrated. They laud the work that GOP Gov. Joe Lombardo is doing through his super PAC to help down-ballot legislative candidates, but say it’s disconnected from the Trump-focused efforts.

“There’s really no organization,” a Republican operative in Nevada said. “He comes out, they scramble to do a rally … but after that, there’s just really nothing else.”

Meridith McGraw and Lisa Kashinsky contributed to this report.