In a long but very excellent piece echoing their December story about the low-energy Republican ground game in Nevada, NBC News opens with an anecdote from last fall about a paid canvasser in the Las Vegas Valley who was marking off addresses on an app meant to track the doors they had knocked on to drum up support for Republican former state Attorney General Adam Laxalt’s campaign challenging incumbent Dem Senator Catherine Cortez-Masto. Problem was that the canvasser, employed by an outside group backing Laxalt, was sitting inside Caesar’s Palace, eight miles away from the street they were marking off as visiting, an example of millions of dollars pissed away by Republicans on such paid efforts last year with little to no return to show for it.

Multiple Republican operatives told NBC this was far from an isolated incident and they said there were plenty of other examples of falsified canvassing data, stemming from the GOP’s reliance on paid street teams rather than volunteers who actually want to be there and get their candidates elected (like Democrats). “That’s why we’re losing elections. Nobody wants to admit it,” one Republican field canvassing ops chief said. Another estimated that typically as 10 to 20 percent of GOP-paid canvassers end up getting fired in an average campaign. What’s worse is that faked data fucks everything upstream, causing campaigns to invest in targeting voters who may not even exist. “If the base data is bad, it’s a disaster for campaigns everywhere,” a field operative told NBC.