“APPLY TODAY! HELP GET-OUT-THE-VOTE FOR PRESIDENT TRUMP! Turnout for Trump has one purpose: To translate President Trump’s massive, once-in-a-generation support among voters across America into a grassroots door-to-door Get-Out-The-Vote army. All we do is canvass neighborhoods in Battleground States, knocking on doors to get people out to vote. If you’re interested in being part of the door-to-door army supporting the President, sign up today,” says the home page of TurnoutForTrump.com, encouraging fans to apply for paid canvasser positions for the Orange God Emperor’s effort to return to the White House to end American democracy.

At the bottom of the page it says “Paid for by Turnout for America and not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. turnoutforamerica.org,” which had us fooled because the fat bastard himself posted “New Job opportunities are available to help GET OUT THE VOTE FOR TRUMP! Visit turnoutfortrump.com/ to apply. We must SWAMP THE VOTE!” late Sunday night. That such a disclaimer is present and that Trump went ahead and promoted it anyway carries the vague air of some sort of FEC violation, but we’re not under any illusion any enforcement is forthcoming.

We actually first saw that casting call on one of the Trump Truth repost accounts, and, lol:

They are paying $40/hour! I’m too far from the battlegrounds states but if anyone out there can help and can use the money – please apply!!!

— Grits&Giggles 🇺🇸🤜🏻 (@GiggleChits) September 2, 2024

Wow! You can make up to $40 an hour knocking on doors for President Trump and start earning overtime ($60 an hour) after ONLY 6 hours of work a day! They also help you with housing and travel. This is a REALLY good opportunity! #MakeAmericaGreatAgain #MAGA #Trump2024

— “Threat to Democracy” Judge Zion Romo (@JudgeZionRomo) September 2, 2024

Pagan muy bien !!! Animensen. ( 40/hora) ( la campaña de la Camarada Kamala no paga jamas tan bien y perdera el tiempo . Sea parte del Triunfo del Presidente Donald Trump.

— Claudia Yadette (@ClaudiaYadette1) September 2, 2024

These are probably real. Probably. It’s just pretty goddamned funny how little they realize they sound like the bots that Disqus is doing a better job of squashing now than they used to.

If that’s really what they’re paying then great for the people who get the job. And not so great for the Trump campaign if the past stories of other paid Republican canvassing efforts is prologue:

“With his foot on a front porch of a stately home in Charleston, SC, a canvasser for a $100 million field effort supporting Florida Gov Ron DeSantis (R) vented on July 7 about a homeowner who he said had told him to get off his lawn. Speaking on his phone while wearing a T-shirt with ‘DESANTIS’ in big font and a lanyard representing the Never Back Down super PAC, he used lewd remarks to describe what he would tell the homeowner to do to him. ‘And I’m a little stoned, so I don’t even care,’ he added, holding materials and appearing to wait for another homeowner to come to the door. The outburst – seen on a Ring doorbell video camera recording that was shared with The Washington Post – led to the canvasser’s dismissal this week, according to an official from Never Back Down,” the Washington Post wrote last year about how things were going just a few months into Pudding Fingers’ then-already-obviously-doomed bid for the GOP nomination.

Though colorful and worth pasting in here, that story was more specific to the DeSantis PAC’s canvassing than one NBC printed a few months earlier, which dove deep into the problems inherent to the GOP using paid help to trudge from door-to-door to get people to vote. It also opened with a hilariously entertaining example about some fucker they had hired to knock on doors in the Las Vegas Valley for ultimately failed Senate candidate Adam Laxalt. The canvasser was fired after their supervisor found out they was just falsely logging contacts into the app, pretending they were working while they were eight miles away gambling at Caesar’s Palace on the Strip.

That was but one example of the types of losers they were hiring, with GOP operatives telling NBC it was far from an isolated incident and they said there were plenty of other examples of falsified canvassing data, stemming from the party’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 in the story. 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, a field operative had told NBC. “If the base data is bad, it’s a disaster for campaigns everywhere,” the person said.

Now we’re not going to pretend to know what the hell’s going on here. Nor do we have any idea what entity is behind the TurnoutForTrump.com website (obviously by design). We could buy it if we were told it was some PAC operation being funded and run independently of the Trump campaign.

And maybe it is but, as you saw, Trump endorsed it, so he’s definitely on board with the idea, and it’s entirely possible that the paid canvassing is being run by a vendor working for the campaign, despite having also launched this friggin “Trump Force 47” volunteer effort earlier this year.

On Sunday the Harris campaign announced they had hosted “a weekend of action,” prior to the convention and that “volunteers completed 10,000 shifts and contacted over 1 million voters. The convention itself helped build on that momentum, generating nearly 200,000 new volunteer shifts since the Monday of convention. On Thursday and Friday alone, volunteers signed up for 90,000 shifts, motivated by the extraordinary excitement around the Vice President’s speech.”

Where’s Trump’s “ground game” at? Who the hell knows. Last month Politico reported that Trump had 300 staffers on the payroll in July, down from 800 the same month in 2020. As for volunteers it’s not hard to imagine that the numbers are anemic too, forcing them into hiring people to do the same thing that others already are doing for the Harris campaign. It seem like a panic move, and one that might be kind of counterproductive among however many “Trump Force 47” members are already on board. Unless you’re truly that “passionate,” why the fuck would you want to do something for free only to find out that latecomers are (allegedly) getting paid $40 an hour to do it?

Then there’s this map of “Trump Force 47” events:

Perusing the list of them, it seems like these events are being stood up independently from the campaign by the “Captains,” as in field organizers for the “Force 47,” which for some reason has four times as many scheduled for the next month in Minnesota than there are in Pennsylvania.

This was all over the place, as for want of any decent insider reporting on the state of the Trump campaign and why their candidate is endorsing a paid canvassing operation – which is a suboptimal strategy based on past performance – we’re left with taking a look at volunteer one they already have – that seems at least partially targeted at the wrong states. God willing this will be one of the articles where in December we can link back to it and say “Click here to see where they fucked up.”