GOP leaders panic as Trump's get-out-the-vote operation stumbles in key states: report
Republican Party officials are increasingly worried as the Trump campaign's voter turnout operation in battleground states is vastly smaller and being built later than it needs to be, according to The Guardian.
Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign, meanwhile, has spent weeks engaging in a ramp-up of hiring and opening campaign offices across the country.
The Republican National Committee was originally planning to open 90 offices around the country — but when former President Donald Trump pushed out longtime chair Ronna McDaniel and installed a new leadership team of loyalists that includes his own daughter-in-law, the plan was abandoned and the GOP strategy shifted to hiring a team of election observers, instead leaving voter turnout to other GOP organizations.
As a consequence, said the report, "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."
The Trump campaign told The Guardian in response that it already has 350 staffers in battleground campaign offices — but by comparison, the Harris campaign has 375 staffers just in Pennsylvania, the battleground state widely considered most likely to decide the election.
Moreover, the outside GOP groups the Trump campaign was hoping to rely on for voter outreach, like Turnout for America, Turning Point Action, America First Works, and the Elon Musk-backed America PAC, have only now begun to ramp up hiring, putting them in a time crunch to get properly organized for the main push of election season.
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The Trump campaign has now ramped up a program of its own called Trump Force 47, where volunteers receive "limited edition" MAGA hats and a list of 10 neighbors to focus efforts to get out the vote in return for merchandise. This strategy, which matches how the campaign secured wins in the primary, stands in contrast to the longstanding RNC strategy of using machine learning to target voters. Other GOP 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."