Trump using DeSantis’s GOTV model
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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 canvassers falsely inflated their numbers, they may owe money back, giving them good reason to look the other way instead. (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.
There is only one precedent for outsourcing voter mobilization to a super PAC: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ doomed primary campaign. Strapped for cash, DeSantis turned over canvassing to the Never Back Down PAC, which encountered many of the same problems that Musk’s America PAC faces today. (This coordination was not legal at the time, but the Federal Election Commission ignored it.) DeSantis’ primary campaign flopped, probably in part because so many key operations were farmed out to the super PAC. Curiously, though, two former DeSantis aides who helped run the governor’s doomed campaign are now steering America PAC for Musk.
Admittedly, the main reason DeSantis’s campaign bellyflopped is that there was never going to be a market for the shirt, sweaty, tryhard Piggly Wiggly brand Trump when the real one was available, but his inept field operation presumably didn’t help.
The contrast with Harris’ operation could not be sharper. In close coordination with national and state parties, her campaign has recruited an army of volunteers who are personally contacting tens of millions of voters. During just one week in October, for instance, volunteers worked 124,000 shifts, knocked on 1.6 million doors, and made 20 million phone calls. The campaign has more than 350 offices and 2,500 staff members across battleground states, and it is using its own tech to identify and turn out persuadable voters for Harris. It has developed targeted messages tailored to specific groups of voters, which volunteers are trained to emphasize. Many Democrats regret their failure to develop a ground game in 2020 due to COVID, when Trump vastly outperformed the polls, even as he lost, and lifted House Republicans along the way; Harris and her allies plainly see 2024 as a chance to get it right.
That last point is important — Biden’s substantial popular vote win tends to make one assume that his lack of ground game didn’t really make a difference in the end, but 1)he under-performed the polls enough to make the election razor-thin in the Electoral College, and 2)he had no coattails at all, failing to unseat a single incumbent House Republican. I wouldn’t count on having a better GOTV mattering, but I wouldn’t dismiss it either.
In the kind of presidential election that was typical before 2000, none of this would really matter, even assuming plausibly that Harris’s more professional operation will be more effective at mobilizing voters at the margin. In an election where every battleground state is polling within the margin of error? Who knows, but take every margin you can get.