Sources inside what little remains of the Ronna Not-Romney McDaniel-led Republican National Committee organization – as it existed prior to the March house cleaning and transformation into a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Trump 2024 campaign – tell the Guardian that the campaign’s ground operation in the swing states is in very bad shape, not just relative to Vice President Kamala Harris’s but to the point where it’s more comparable to a midterm election than a presidential year.

The RNC had planned to put 90 full-time staffers on the ground in Pennsylvania, a turnout effort that was scrapped in favor of focusing on “election integrity” while letting groups like Elon Musk’s America PAC, Turnout for America (the one that’s now hiring paid canvassers), Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point Action, and America First Works, all of them starting late when it takes multiple contacts to get a voter to turn in a ballot. Harris’s team meanwhile has at least 375 staffers in Pennsylvania alone.

Team Orange are betting big on their “Trump Force 47” plan, which incentivized fans to become “captains” with a special limited-edition gold MAGA hat by getting at least 10 low-propensity voters to turn out for the fat bastard in the primary. The old RNC leftovers remained skeptical then and still are, noting that Trump’s national turnout in the primaries fell short of 2020 and that people were just trying to do the bare minimum to get the gold MAGA hats rather than actually rack up enthusiasm for Donald. “If the Trump campaign pulls it off, it will be the model for all campaigns going forward. If it fails, it will be the fault of [Trump 2024 political director] James Blair,” one former RNC staffer said.