“With just a few weeks to Election Day and early voting already underway in several states, it’s peak time for the ‘ground game’ that campaigns have spent months preparing. Back in May, on-the-ground Republican operatives voiced concerns to The Federalist that the Republican National Committee’s operations weren’t keeping pace with grassroots in swing states. Now, as Election Day nears, a narrative has emerged in the corporate media about the Trump campaign’s ‘paltry’ ground game,” wrote far right propaganda site the Federalist ten days ago in a piece titled “Outside Conservative Groups Are Leading Trump’s Ground Game. That Might Be A Good Thing.”

Stop being overconfident or cocky.

Go chase ballots.

Find new voters.

It’s a 50% chance Trump wins.

Do something to make a difference.

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) October 18, 2024

That Federalist article might be what an outfit clearly bothered when a “narrative has emerged in the corporate media” about a serious weak spot in their effort to return convicted felon former President Trump to the White House would print and the tweet above might be contributing to that “narrative” considering that small-faced bastard is urging fans to hit the bricks rather than touting the number of doors his group has knocked on in the states they’ve been tasked with delivering to Trump.

Picking up where we left off in Blank Canvass two weeks ago, we’ve since collected more reporting on convicted felon former President Trump’s “ground game” as outsourced to Kirk and ketamine brained “genius” Elon Musk. And the “narrative” that the Federalist decried earlier this month seems to be picking up some steam even if, still despite maybe having a semi-coherent picture based on the lack of a Biden 2020 field operation until the last month vs Hillary Clinton’s in 2016, we’re not so sure what the ultimate impact is going to be. Former Trump White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer last month told The Hill that “An effective ground game is worth 2-3 points, and every one of these battlegrounds is within 2-3 points,” but Sean Spicer is full of shit and so is The Hill.

The full picture, whatever it is, seems just anecdotal as all the posts you see here, on Twitter, and other sites that are always some variation of “I was driving through rural Heroinburg County, West Carolina and I noticed there aren’t anywhere near as many Trump signs out in front of people’s homes as there were in 2020.” Then again they do seem a little more creditable than Lara Trump telling Fox News that flight attendants leave her secret pro-MAGA notes written on cocktail napkins.

But we’ve got more now than we did earlier this month, so we’ll try to go in a straight line:

🇺🇸 On Sunday the New York Times reported that a volunteer group of MAGA canvassers with the Kenosha County, Wisconsin GOP were working with a voter list that “did not always yield their targets. One of the first people on the list of one group of canvassers was a man who, when approached, said he was a Democrat. They politely thanked him and moved on. Another man whose name was on the list told canvassers that he had voted Republican for decades and was already a solid supporter of Mr Trump,” an indication that their database is fucked up.

🇺🇸 A few days before that the Dispatch reported that, as of Tuesday the 5th, the Harris campaign’s Erie, Pennsylvania office had written on a chalkboard they had knocked on 24,016 doors, in single county representing more than a tenth of that Maloney asshole’s statewide tally. “I did talk to our canvassers yesterday, and they said this weekend was the first time they saw, you know, literature from the Trump campaign,” the Erie Dem Party Chairman, Sam Talarico, told the Dispatch. A Pittsburgh-area Dem consultant said every year he sees canvassers from both parties on his street and he goes out of his way to say hi and ask who they’re with. This year? “I’ve yet to see a Republican,” said Mike Mikus. “I may have missed them. I might not have been home.”

🇺🇸 “Trump volunteers are just a different breed compared to your traditional breed of Republican volunteers,” one Michigan GOP operative told the Wall Street Journal this week. “Their idea of volunteering is doing a sign waving or a boat parade,” he continued, explaining why the Trump GOTV efforts had knocked on a tenth as many doors in the Great Lakes state as they had in 2016. The Journal’s article also mentioned that Musk’s “America PAC” was paying people $30 per door knocked. “That is an exorbitant amount for such work, which more typically is closer to single digits for each door, people close to the industry said,” the Journal writes, adding that it had revised the pay down to $30 per hour… And you already know where this is going but we’ll get to it.

🇺🇸 More from the Journal article: Charlie Kirk’s operation in Wisconsin was such a clusterfuck that Musk’s had to take over, something that was sold as a “partnership.” In reality it was a demotion for Kirk, whose organization’s sole function in the Chessehead State is to book hotel rooms for out-of-state ballot chasers. “Republicans are trying to scramble and clean up Turning Point’s mess and recuperate as many votes that were missed as possible,” said a GOP operative in the state.

🇺🇸 And it’s not an upgrade: Earlier this week the Guardian reported that Musk’s America PAC’s canvassing app is complete piece of shit, requiring too much bandwidth to be useful to walkers focused on rural areas. “The Campaign Sidekick app effectively forces canvassers who have less than 40mbps of internet – sufficient to stream 4K video – to use ‘offline walkbooks’ which have no geo-tracking feature and do not always upload after a route is completed,” wrote Hugo Lowell, who’s done some great reporting on the “ground game” situation these last few weeks. And, again, if you’ve been paying any attention to past stories on how canvassing works you know what’s coming.

🇺🇸 More on the app first: Previously Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall posted an email exchange with a veteran of field ops but he was focused on Kirk’s operation’s app, the product of a self-dealing scam by his lieutenant (and indicted fake Trump 2020 elector) Tyler Bowyer. Now it’s clear that Musk’s is a clusterfuck too. Copying this verbatim just to underscore how bad it is: “America Pac has tried to deter cheating by sending out teams of auditors to trail canvassers, but there is no way to directly audit every offline walkbook – which is particularly high because of the Trump campaign’s focus on hitting low propensity voters. And even when canvassers legitimately complete a route offline, that data has sometimes failed to upload afterwards, the people said. Since the canvassers are paid by the door, they have to redo their work, wasting time and potentially annoying voters for harassing them twice,” Lowell writes, then quoting from a Republican operative working with Team Ketamine who says “Maybe Elon Musk can give his canvassers a Starlink.”

🇺🇸 Now for the totally expected development: As good as Lowell is at this, he let Reuters beat him to reporting rampant cheating and fuckery in the America PAC operation in a Friday report on how badly the effort is going overall. It got to the point where one of the Wisconsin canvassers, Alysia McMillan, is basically a whistleblower. She told the wire service that on October 8th a field organizer announced that the operation was going to miss its goal of hitting 450,000 homes in the state by quite a lot. “If this isn’t looked into in a timely manner, this can result in a waste of time and money and risk President Trump winning the election,” McMillan said, evidently freaking out about the constant missing of daily quotas. Despite Musk dumping $75 million into the effort, three of the canvassers said they’d quit because they were only making $20/hour and sometimes weren’t even reimbursed for gas they needed to drive to rural areas where the voters Trump is targeting live.

🇺🇸 “Our auditors keep catching people cheating,” said a text message between two Nevada canvassing contractors obtained by Reuters. “We’ve fired two people today and auditors are going around checking doors for flyers.” Meaning they have to check to see if their employees left fucking hanging flyers on the doorknobs to determine whether or not the canvassers are lying.

🇺🇸 What The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell lacked in speed he made up for with damning detail in a report dropping just this morning: As much as a quarter of all the door-knocks logged by the America PAC in Nevada and Arizona this week were fake. “The unusual activity logs, for instance, showed a canvasser who was marked by GPS as sitting at a ‘Guayo’s On the Trail’ restaurant half a mile away from the doors he was supposedly hitting in Globe, Arizona. Another canvasser was recorded marking voters as ‘not home’ two blocks away from that apartment,” wrote Lowell about just one instance of the fuckery that they might have seen coming.

🇺🇸 It’s taking too long to find the assholes too. One guy was fired after five days in which he faked 796 door knocks (can’t rule out that he was a lib saboteur). “Part of the problem with paid canvassing, in general, is that canvassing vendors are disincentivized to fire canvassers the more doors they hit because the vendors are paid by the door. If the doors are not hit, the vendor owes money back to the client or owes that many ‘free’ doors. For America Pac, there is further disincentive for vendors to fire canvassers who might only be frauding one door out of every 10 – effectively someone who just cuts corners – because the labor supply of canvassers is diminished this late in the cycle and hiring a replacement is increasingly difficult,” Lowell writes.

Does this mean Trump is fucked? No. Even if the entire internal emails and databases of both Charlie Kirk and Elon Musk’s operations – and Harris’s campaign GOTV teams – got dumped on November 4th and we were able to put them side-by-side we still wouldn’t have any way of knowing what the impact would be on the outcome. Of course we would love it if Sean Spicer were right and that Harris’s good field ops pads her totals by 2-3 percent and Trump’s bad one costs him 2-3 percent.

That’s the ballgame right there. For all the fucking bullshit ways Trump escaped accountability for his four criminal cases before the election there will be one so very sweet side effect you can draw a straight line from it: Trump and the RNC dismantled their “ground game” – one that we again have some reason to believe was pretty effective if just not enough in 2020 – and outsourced it to assclowns Charlie Kirk and Elon Musk simply because his political operations were broke from all the legal bills he found himself paying. Running for president again with the sole objective of avoiding going to prison, God willing, will become a prophecy self-fulfilled for the fat degenerate fuck.

But Kamala Harris has to win first. So let’s smoosh in a livestream of her effort to do so.