Republican officials are raising the alarm that Donald Trump’s campaign has invested far fewer resources for its voter turnout operation in battleground states than previous presidential election races, and attempts to bridge the gap with political action committees have come too late.
The Republican National Committee once envisioned an extensive field operation for the 2024 election, including having about 90 staffers in the must-win state of Pennsylvania.
But the Trump campaign scrapped those plans when it took over the RNC in March, redirecting the focus on field operations to combating supposed voter fraud and pursuing a twin voter turnout strategy of relying on several political action committees and ardent Trump volunteers.
The result has been that the Trump campaign has put fewer resources into its ground game in battleground states, according to people familiar with the matter – and Republican officials have derisively said the Trump operation is more comparable in size to a midterm cycle than a presidential.
In response to reporting for this story, the Trump campaign said their field operation is larger than the RNC’s in 2022, which had 350 staffers in battleground states and 50 in Pennsylvania, according to RNC midterms data obtained by the Guardian.
Still, the Trump campaign appears to be dwarfed by the Harris operation, which is understood to have roughly 375 staffers in Pennsylvania alone, after Democrats spent years building up its voter turnout efforts in the state that could decide the election.
The Trump campaign also dismissed criticism about its presence, arguing it ultimately does not matter so long as their “Trump Force 47 captains” and the Pacs together knock on enough doors of low-propensity Trump voters, especially in rural areas.
That last contention, at least, is true: the RNC used to focus on suburban areas where they could hit more doors in a single day than in rural areas, which they instead just targeted with a blitz of mail ads.
But the Pacs, which are supposed to bridging the gap, have been slow to spool up, according to people with direct access to the data for groups like America Pac, Turnout for America, Turning Point Action and America First Works.
They have only started to hire at a rapid clip in recent weeks, the people said, meaning they are reaching Trump supporters late in the cycle when it often takes repeated ‘voter contacts’ to get them to return a ballot.
The situation means that not only is the size of the formal Trump operation particularly small for the 2024 election, but the door-knockers and canvassers recruited by the Pacs might be less effective compared to previous presidential cycles.
At least part of the reason why the Trump campaign has been slow to the ground game this cycle is because of a messy situation at the RNC, according to current and former employees.
When the Trump campaign took over the RNC, it implemented a hiring freeze apart from asking staff it summarily fired to reapply for roles. Trump was also more interested in supposed mass voter fraud, the employees said, diverting resources to “election integrity” efforts.
But after Kamala Harris became the nominee and drew roughly level in key polls, following Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race, it became clear the unglamorous efforts to convince likely voters to cast a ballot could make a critical difference in a close election.
The Trump campaign took the gamble to outsource its ground game, after the Federal Election Commission gave permission for campaigns to coordinate their voter turnout efforts with the Pacs, freeing the Trump to spend his war chest on rallies and legal bills.
The change in the rules meant the Trump campaign viewed outsourcing as less risky than when the Florida governor Ron DeSantis used a Super Pac in the Republican primary and lost badly. (Ironically, former DeSantis primary aides Phil Cox and Generra Peck are now running the America Pac doing field operations for Trump).
Still, the Trump campaign has quietly made a concerted effort to boost its own paid staff in battleground states and has leaned more heavily into the Trump Force 47 captains program, reducing their reliance on the Pacs.
The Trump Force 47 program reprises the same formula that worked in the Republican primary, where ardent Trump supporters receive limited edition Maga hats and other merchandise to get their neighbors to vote.
Each volunteer initially receives a list of 10 neighbors to personally mobilize. If they meet that target, they receive larger lists that also include people who are harder to reach by conventional voter turnout methods such as television ads, mail, and phone banks.
Related: Harris campaign raised $361m in August, triple the amount of Trump campaign
“Trump Force 47 is focused on spending maximal attention and resources on turning out infrequent or ‘sometimes’ voters, whereas the NTL model valued every voter contact equally,” the Trump official said, referring to the ‘Neighborhood Team Leader’ model run by the RNC.
It was not clear why the Trump Force 47 model was necessarily better at targeting low propensity voters than what current and former employees said the RNC had been doing for years with machine learning, other than to justify scrapping the plan.
And Republican officials have been wary of the program, sniping that they saw the volunteers as being as incentivized to rush through the process simply to get the hats as any other get-out-the-vote scheme, noting the turnout for Trump in the primaries was not particularly high.
“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 James Blair,” one former RNC staffer said, referring to the Trump campaign’s political director.
