If we had picked up last week’s Politico story “Republicans are starting to raise alarms about Trump’s ground game” on the day of it would have been (at least) the seventh such article that National Zero ran last month – all saying more or less the same thing that story’s headline already did.
Lara Trump hands out donuts at some stupid volunteer event for her dickhead father-in-law’s campaign
That all these pieces in this new sub-genre of political reporting were largely redundant doesn’t mean they weren’t worth picking up. Quotes like “We are totally fucked in the field” from anonymous Trump minions and “If there were a really effective GOP get-out-the-vote operation, I feel like we’d be getting all these dark profiles of [Charlie] Kirk, and stories implying that Turning Point USA is using questionable legal methods to steal the election” from some National Review dipshit’s piece were golden, irrespective of how incomprehensible of a picture these very entertaining stories paint about the ultimate impact on the outcome of next month’s apocalyptic election.
It’s not very comprehensible. Look at say, reporting on how an aide to New York City Mayor Eric Adams sent him a text saying “To be on the safe side, Please Delete all messages you send me,” to which Adams responded, “Always do,” when communicating electronically about the details of their various scams. That’s in the actual indictment and the reporting is sourced from it. NBC’s story quotes from a retired Baruch College political science professor, Doug Muzzio, saying “Stick a fork in him. He’s cooked.” That guy’s really just adding color commentary to what’s an already extremely obvious take: That Eric Adams will not be the Mayor of New York City come January 1st, 2026.
(Also obvious that Adams will also almost certainly be in a federal prison by then too. In fact that was probably what the Muzzio guy actually meant, but same thing as far as the next election goes).
Meanwhile from that Politico story we’ve got an anonymous swing state GOP operative complaining that the convicted felon former president’s “Trump Force 47” volunteer ops, where “captains” can earn cool Trump swag for getting other people registered and to return their ballots is “almost like a timeshare scheme. You have to go in and do the training, and you get the swag and the hat and the yard sign. That’s what you have to do to go get it. It doesn’t seem like people are really being activated, and the campaign’s not very forthcoming on whether they’ve been activated.”
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Let’s keep Arizona RED! 🔴 pic.twitter.com/ToMGBphynv
— Republican Party of Arizona (@AZGOP) October 5, 2024
Again, that’s some good hopium for libs – very on brand for Trump with the “timeshare scheme” line, but in this day and age and especially with a unique piece of shit cult figure like him, how can one ever come close to feeling like they know what the effect of a (supposedly, allegedly) disorganized and fucked up field operation is going to be in a hotly-contested presidential election?
We might have a hint. On November 2, 2020, Time Magazine printed a story titled “An Election Day Upset Hangs on Donald Trump’s Formidable Ground Game,” warning that Trump was not in nearly as bad of shape as the polls indicated because of a tactical error by the Biden campaign and the DNC:
The ground effort run jointly by the RNC and the Trump campaign has used 2.6 million volunteers, according to figures provided by the RNC. The field effort made more than 182 million voter contacts – more than five times what they did in 2016 – and volunteers registered nearly 174,000 new GOP voters.
The campaign is focusing its efforts in the final days to reach “infrequent and low propensity voters,” according to a Trump campaign official. Early voter registration figures in Florida, North Carolina and other states show that Republicans have “essentially neutralized what had been a Democrat advantage” by mobilizing new voters, John Podesta, who ran Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 bid for president, tells TIME.
Further down is the real lesson from hindsight:
As Republicans hustled in the field, the Biden campaign shut down its ground operation in the spring due to the coronavirus pandemic, and through the summer focused on building an entirely digital operation. Biden’s forces didn’t knock on a single door until October, ceding the field to Trump until late in the race.
But the Biden campaign has engaged in aggressive digital outreach: they made 58 million voter contacts Halloween weekend alone, according to the campaign, whereas the RNC made 15 million voter contacts from Oct 23 through Oct 29, according to the RNC. “A ground game matters,” said Stepien, who took over the campaign from Brad Parscale, who had burned through hundreds of millions of dollars to little evident effect, frittering away a sizable cash advantage and leaving the campaign outgunned in the final stretch.
The math seems to back it up. The table below might be a bit wonky, but it’s a (fairly) simple proposition. Joe Biden in 2020 improved nationally over Hillary Clinton by 23.43 percent in total votes while Trump improved only 17.84 percent, a delta of 5.59 percent between them. In four swing states – Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – that Vice President Kamala Harris needs to win to secure 276 electoral votes, it was closer at Biden 2020 +20.79 over Hillary 2016 to Trump’s 15.9 percent improvement from 2016, at a 4.89 delta. Drill deeper and you see some trouble spots.
| The “Delta” column represents the jurisdiction’s difference between the national baseline for Biden’s improvement over Hillary (5.59 percent) and Trump’s improvement between 2016 and 2020. A positive delta means Trump over-performed the national baseline. Note how the actual closest states/counties do not directionally correspond to the performance improvements – likely representing the difference between where the Trump campaign/RNC were prepared by having a canvassing operation organized in place well before the election year even started (Philly, Detroit, Nevada, etc) and where they were caught off guard (Arizona, Georgia). | |||||||
| County/State | Trump 2016 | Hillary 2016 | Trump 2020 | Biden 2020 | R+ Pct | D+ Pct | Delta |
| Maricopa County, AZ | 747,361 | 702,907 | 995,665 | 1,040,774 | 33.22 | 48.07 | -9.26 |
| Arizona | 1,252,401 | 1,161,167 | 1,661,686 | 1,672,143 | 32.68 | 44.01 | -5.74 |
| Fulton County, GA | 117,783 | 297,051 | 137,247 | 380,212 | 16.53 | 28.00 | -5.88 |
| Georgia | 2,089,104 | 1,877,963 | 2,461,854 | 2,473,633 | 17.84 | 31.72 | -8.29 |
| Genessee County, MI | 84,175 | 102,751 | 98,714 | 119,390 | 17.27 | 16.19 | 6.67 |
| Wayne County, MI | 228,993 | 519,444 | 264,553 | 597,170 | 15.53 | 14.96 | 6.16 |
| Michigan | 2,279,543 | 2,268,839 | 2,649,852 | 2,804,040 | 16.24 | 23.59 | -1.76 |
| Clark County, NV | 320,057 | 402,227 | 430,930 | 521,852 | 34.64 | 29.74 | 10.49 |
| Nevada | 512,058 | 539,260 | 669,890 | 703,486 | 30.82 | 30.45 | 5.96 |
| Allegheny Couny, PA | 259,480 | 367,617 | 282,913 | 430,759 | 9.03 | 17.18 | -2.56 |
| Philadelphia County | 108,748 | 584,025 | 132,870 | 604,175 | 22.18 | 3.45 | 24.32 |
| Pennsylvania | 2,970,733 | 2,926,441 | 3,377,674 | 3,458,229 | 13.7 | 18.17 | 1.12 |
| Milwaukee County | 126,069 | 288,822 | 134,482 | 317,527 | 6.67 | 9.94 | 2.32 |
| Dane County, WI | 71,275 | 217,697 | 78,794 | 260,121 | 10.55 | 19.49 | -3.35 |
| Wisconsin | 1,405,284 | 1,382,536 | 1,610,184 | 1,630,866 | 14.58 | 17.96 | 2.21 |
| Blue Wall + Nevada | 7,167,618 | 7,117,076 | 8,307,600 | 8,596,621 | 15.9 | 20.79 | 0.70 |
| National | 62,984,828 | 65,853,514 | 74,223,975 | 81,283,501 | 17.84 | 23.43 | 0.00 |
The old “Joe Biden won by only 43,000-odd votes” is true. But the data above are VERY strong indications that, quite possibly more than anything else, the unilateral disarmament on in-person voter contacts due to COVID was the one thing that nearly got us a second Trump term. Just look at those Philly numbers. The 34,000 and change more votes Trump got there in 2020 than he did in 2016 represent nearly half of the total margin for Biden in the entire state. On October 1st, 2020 Politico reported that the Biden campaign had done a 180 on door-knocking, after the Trump campaign hit 1.5 million homes in Pennsylvania by that time while Team Biden had hit zero. “I think it’s too little too late,” said a Dem strategist quoted in the story. “If it’s true that Trump is knocking a million [doors] a week and we are doing zero, that’s criminal negligence on the Democrats’ part.”
If this analysis holds up, that late reversal by the Biden campaign probably saved American democracy. At the same time, if we assume that Biden’s gains would have been proportional, the election would have very likely had been called for him the night of, no matter how many goddamned uncounted absentee ballots were still out there, and the course of American politics over the last four years would have been very different in ways that are hard to imagine.
Mind-blowing that the Democratic Party is massively outspending the Republican Party in swing states!
The Democrats have become the party of the rich and entitled (just look at their donor list) and the Republicans have become the party of the people.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 1, 2024
Now if we have maybe a slightly clearer idea what it looks like when one side is advantaged over another in the last presidential election, what does that mean this year – when Democrats are most certainly not unilaterally disarming on field operations the way they did in 2020 – one of the guys who’s supposed to be in charge of one of those sides’ efforts is complaining that Dems are outspending him? We have new info coming in every day that we need to collate and summarize, but this is going on pretty long and we’re going to have to continue in another installment.
Two final notes however – Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall has also been doing a very great job putting all this information together and came to several important conclusions:
(1) There’s far too much of this chatter from Republicans to dismiss all the pants-pissing as simply sour grapes. For example, one of the stories we picked up last month had mentioned that Ronna Not-Romney was complaining that Trump had just completely destroyed a canvassing structure that was working at least well enough. Of course she’s bitter about being fired in an election year but it can also be true that she (kind of) knew what she was doing. The data above would seem to bear this out, especially with regard to her urban strategy that Donald trashed.
(2) On the subject of the mobile app that Charlie Kirk’s operation is using to canvass, Marshall on Friday wrote that it probably doesn’t matter if they spun up a new app as long as the database was in good shape and connected to other operations. If not then there’s going to be problems. Then this morning the AP printed an article which said, verbatim “Turning Point, for example, is not sharing its voter data with Data Trust, a Republican information clearinghouse that allows GOP campaigns and groups to use data collected by groups throughout the party’s ecosystem. Other Republican operatives said Turning Point is not sharing data with key statewide campaigns in the battlegrounds they are prioritizing. Such data is the ‘lifeblood’ of modern electioneering, said [Tyler] Montague, the Arizona Republican [strategist] who has been critical of Turning Point.”
GROUND 'GAIN': Tech billionaire Elon Musk’s political action committee is offering starting wages of $30 an hour to individuals seeking to increase voter registration and turnout, the PAC’s website shows. https://t.co/IipaEFNpyh pic.twitter.com/8ldoWOQLy0
— FOX Business (@FoxBusiness) October 7, 2024
Stay tuned for more in-depth or in-breadth on what’s hopefully an absolute fucking epic disaster in the making (because you really, really, really should not pay people to do this shit).