Trump’s outsourcing to Elon
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Because of Trump’s looting of the RNC’s infrastructure, Elon Musk has filled the vacuum in terms of multiple aspects of the Trump campaign. As we’ve already discussed, the first of these is the use of anti-trans demagoguery as a closing argument, which however it works out politically is pretty clearly not being driven by a dispassionate analysis of the median voter in battleground states:
I’m open to the idea things are different this time and there’s some very thin background reporting to that effect, but one reason to be suspicious is that the issue just happens to be the new top donor’s absolute maximum priority https://t.co/8U3dSSVsge— Benjy Sarlin (@BenjySarlin) October 18, 2024
The thin reporting in question that I’ve seen tends to overlook that centrist and Republican operatives can be just as prone to pundit’s fallacies as anyone else.
The good news for Democrats is that Musk has no idea how to run a GOTV operation and never knows what he doesn’t know:
The political action committee funded by billionaire Elon Musk to help re-elect former U.S. President Donald Trump is struggling in some swing states to meet doorknocking goals and is investigating claims that some canvassers lied about the number of voters they have contacted, according to people involved in the group’s efforts.
The difficulties, in pivotal battleground states including Wisconsin and Nevada, come as the group, America PAC, races to enlist voters behind the Republican candidate in the final two weeks before the Nov. 5 election. 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.
This probably also means less than many political professionals think, but in a razor-thin election — anything can matter.
What does worry me more is Elon’s very Republican lack of scruples, which has led to some of the kind of ratfucking that helped Trump win in 2016:
There’s deeply cynical and then there’s things which might be illegal. In the first category we have an Elon Musk-funded PAC microtargeting Jewish and Arab communities with diametrically opposed ads about Kamala Harris’s support for Israel or Palestine. Amazingly cynical. But then you have what I’m going to describe next which comes from another Musk-funded dark money operation. They have set up fake sites impersonating the Harris campaign using fake policy positions and then sending out text messages also impersonating the campaign which aim to drive voters to the fake site. (A lot of potential legal and regulatory questions turns on word like “fake” and “impersonating”, which we’ll return to in a moment.)
I found out about this from this article by Anna Massoglia at OpenSecrets. As far as I can tell she’s the first to report it. The project is the work of Building America’s Future PAC, which seems to be largely and perhaps now entirely funded by Elon Musk. It’s part of a network of Musk-funded PACs which are run and/or organized by a group of operatives who ran Ron DeSantis’s failed presidential campaign. America PAC is another of these entities organized with the same money and by the same operatives. That’s the one doing the canvassing and get out the vote operations.
As Massoglia reports, in late September Building America’s Future set up a site called Progress 2028 which purports to be Kamala Harris’s response or counter to Project 2025. The site is designed to have the general appearance of a Harris site in the sense of being in favor of gun regulation, supportive of gender-affirming care, etc. but with wildly over-the-top versions of those policies. So for instance, it calls for minor children to be able to get sex change operations at school without the knowledge of or interference from parents, calls for a mandatory gun buy-back program etc.
The PAC also funded a text message campaign which pushes the same fake policy messages impersonating Harris’s campaign and drives recipients of the texts to the site.
Republican gutting of the enforcement of federal election law is a huge advantage to campaigns engaging in dubious-to-clearly-illegal campaign tactics like this — the laws are applied either not at all or weakly and after it’s already too late. We’d better hope it doesn’t work, because however this internal power struggle/collaboaration would play out, there is no good ending:
My understanding is that it’s an actual dynamic behind the race. Republicans think Trump will be a vegetable in office, so Thiel/Vance were hoping to puppeteer him. And then Musk saw a window for HIM to be puppetmaster, which is why he suddenly took over the campaign. https://t.co/Yzztlovlbe— Will Stancil (@whstancil) October 19, 2024