This isn’t going to be that lengthy of a “big picture” piece like “Blank Canvass” Parts I and II. This does seem like the right time for a coda to them however, given the last few days’ of reporting on the state of the get-out-the-vote operations run by small-faced dipshit Charlie Kirk and ketamine-brained psychopath billionaire Elon Musk. What was, and still is, a “blank” is the ultimate effect on the final result of the 2024 election. We gamed out a VERY rough idea of what possibly was the end result in 2020 when the Biden campaign ceded the “ground game” to Trump until that October due to COVID but that was more like fine-tuning a question than coming close to answering it.
Still, that Trump got 34,000 more votes in Philadelphia in 2020 than he did in 2016 was no accident. If he had managed to get, say, 134,000 more votes in the city plus another 200,000 in Detroit and 40,000 more in Las Vegas he would have won a second term and all we would’ve fucking heard about from the media for the past four years was how Dems blew it on the “ground game.”
We don’t know who won 2024, but Team Orange definitely blew their “ground game.” Observe:
🇺🇸 On Friday NBC reported that “All hell has broken loose” inside of Elon Musk’s “America PAC” operation, according to an anonymous source inside the effort. Another said that if any of the swing states “come down to 10, 15, 20,000 voters, or even less, and it turns out” that vendor Blitz Canvassing had not hit all of its door-knocking targets then “man, there’s going to be hell to pay.”
🇺🇸 Allan Smith, the very same NBC reporter whose June 2023 story on the asshole canvasser who was gambling in Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas in October 2022 while he was pretending to knock on doors for Senate loser Adam Laxalt’s campaign wrote this story. Smith at the time wrote that paid canvassers fucking off on the job can have catastrophic downstream effects for campaigns. “Yet operatives working on the America PAC effort, some of whom had experience working in races over the last few cycles, when canvassing operations were similarly plagued by suspicious entries, said the amount of flagged data surpassed even what they experienced then,” Smith writes now.
🇺🇸 Also on Friday the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reported that the CEO of Sidekick, the app that Team Ketamine use to record their door-knocks emailed Musk’s minions on September 24th to warn them of the sheer volume of voter contacts that had been faked. The situation leaked out to Lowell in the subsequent weeks and “As a result of that reporting, America Pac moved to restrict access to the unusual activity logs and toggled off the feature for dozens of users, who promptly complained and ultimately had their user privileges restored, two of the people said.” Meaning that the response to the leaks was that Musk’s minions shut off their access to the data indicating massive fraud, not that they made any dramatic changes in strategy to prevent themselves from getting fucked over.
🇺🇸 Last week’s reporting from Wired’s Jake Lahut… Goddamn. “Shit is always gonna produce shit,” a Trump minion told Lahut in the Wednesday story about “what happens when you let a bunch of grifters take over” the get-out-the-vote operations the way the campaign did, leading to all these articles. It’s mostly about Musk again, but there’s some funny shit about Tucker Carlson and Michigan GOP-sponsored 10xVotes app is just utter garbage. The website says “Setup [sic] your account today to get access to voters who share aligned values. Find family, friends, or neighbors who are less than 50 percent likely to vote this November. Claim people you know to receive their voting options (ie Absentee/Same Day Polling Locations.) Share with likeminded people and encourage them to do the same. Vote. Get your people out to vote. Win!” but Lahut writes the app doesn’t import contacts, instead prompting you to search for people in the app’s database that you know who would be prime targets for Trump outreach. “This reporter created an account and tried searching for family members in Michigan who would fall squarely under the category of low-propensity voters and came up with no results,” Lahut writes. Now for the Musk situation. Hoo boy…
🇺🇸 “What happens is, you skim a bunch of money off the top, and then you hire the dumbest people and pay them a little bit of money,” a Trump-aligned GOP strategist said about Musk’s PAC. “There’s no way of tracking whether it’s effective or not. It’s hard to track the output, and thus the effectiveness of the output.” The America PAC app’s fucked, you already know that. You already know the canvassers are ripping them off – though in one funny aside Michigan Dem state Senator Mallory McMorrow – famous for her calling out of the “groomer” bullshit and who’s probably going to be a US Senator or Congresswoman someday – told Lahut she’s been knocking on doors herself for Harris and Congresswoman Elissa Slotkin’s Senate campaign and only recently for the first time came across a Trump canvasser, a guy with America PAC. “This guy told one of the people on our team that he’s a Democrat,” says McMorrow, “but he’s taking the money and doing it anyway.”
🇺🇸 After that report on the app Lahut dropped one that put him on the map: The tale of America PAC canvassers being driven around Michigan like cattle in the seatless back of a U-Haul van, complete with a video recording. “I’m scared,” the door knocker who spoke to Lahut says in the clip. “And all [the manager] is concerned about is how many motherfuckin’ doors the bitch got.”
🇺🇸 On Saturday Lahut followed up with “Canvassers for Elon Musk’s America PAC Were Fired and Stranded in Michigan After Speaking Out,” a direct consequence of the video and this one’s a freaking shitshow. “Standing next to her hastily packed suitcase in Michigan’s Macomb County Wednesday night, Tyra Muldrow had a bad feeling in her gut. ‘I have this eerie feeling that I need to get the hell up out of there,’ says Muldrow, a 20-year-old Black woman from Florida. She was in Michigan as a door knocker, hired by a subcontractor for Elon Musk’s America PAC operation to turn out the vote for Donald Trump in the heavily contested working-class suburbs of Detroit. Muldrow and the rest of her canvassing group of roughly a dozen people had just been fired en masse, after WIRED reported that they had been tricked and threatened as part of Musk’s get-out-the-vote effort,” Lahut writes after Team Musk had easily figured out which group recorded the video.
🇺🇸 Muldrow had been recruited into it by her cousin on the promise of $2,000/week doing some unspecified political work. It wasn’t until she had landed in Michigan that Blitz Canvassing had told her she was knocking on doors for Trump. The “cell” she was part of were mostly Black out-of-staters forced to share rooms with each other in motels and Airbnbs. When the hammer dropped, Muldrow and the rest were stranded in Michigan with no way home and no pay. A local activist Connor Berdy, who had met Muldrow a week or two earlier while Berdy’s group Vote For Change LLC was canvassing for a local school board race, picked her up and paid for her flight back home to Florida. “First I see Tyra on the side of the road with her suitcase and everything,” Berdy told Lahut about the rescue op. “So I pull up, turn my hazards on, act like an Uber, and then right as she starts walking around, I hear someone say, ‘Where’s Tyra?’ And, ‘Oh, that sneaky little bitch.’”
🇺🇸 Lahut writes that “After she returned home, Muldrow didn’t think she was going to get paid what was owed to her any time soon. However, on Saturday night, right after WIRED reached out to Jones for comment, Muldrow heard from her cousin for the first time since she’d been fired. ‘You did not get 1000 doors but to make this right and move forward we will pay you the $2000,’ she wrote, according to text messages reviewed by WIRED. ‘The quickest solution I can think of is to send someone to pay you in cash.’ Later that night, shortly after WIRED reached out to America PAC for comment, Muldrow was pleasantly surprised. She’d just been paid $2,000 on Cash App. The caption? ‘For Michigan Gotv 742 doors paid in full.’ A few minutes later, Muldrow got a follow up text from [her cousin, Ebony] Jones. ‘Please let wired know that you’ve been paid asap.'”
And that’s where we’re at for Trump’s get-out-the-vote operation this year, one that was completely scrapped from the Ronna RNC’s effective-ish and experienced in-house teams during the February ragnarok and outsourced to incompetent scumbags Charlie Kirk and Elon Musk. It’s an absolute fucking wreck and should it come down to fatass being on the wrong side of a few ten thousand votes in one or two swing states this whole record is going to be the story of the 2024 election.
After all, it isn’t happening in a vacuum. “The Harris campaign said Sunday that more than 90,000 volunteers knocked on over 3 million doors across the seven battleground states during the election’s final weekend,” Axios reported on Monday. Not even going to bother trying to find a straight answer from Musk and Kirk on how many houses their paid canvassers claimed they hit.