Republicans in battleground states are warning Donald Trump that he doesn’t have a voting operation on the ground.
Donald Trump thought the election was over when Joe Biden entered the race. Trump never bothered to grow or invest in voting operations in warring states. Instead, he left that effort to a private conservative group, but Biden no longer running, and now, the former president has a big problem.
The Washington Post reported:
When Trump has repeatedly said Republican Party officials only need to focus on the integrity of the election, he has begun to hear from outside allies who do not have a significant ground game in the country’s main war. He has been irritated by some of the media’s focus on his campaign staff, suggesting to others that his advisers are getting too much credit. Some advisers have urged them to spend more on digital advertising, saying they are being pummeled online.
Here’s how bad it is in swing states for Trump, “With less than 100 days before the election, local GOP officials in battleground states have raised the alarm about the shortage of Trump campaign field staff. For a large army of paid and volunteer door-knockers and canvassers who usually push for presidential elections, the campaign largely relies on outside groups such as America First Works, America PAC and Turning Point Action.
Field staff in the field are the people who drive participation in the battlefield countries. If no person or office is organized, no one is available to vote.
In contrast, this is the Harris-Walz campaign in only two states that were visited there (Arizona and Nevada) by the Harris campaign:
The Harris-Walz team has more than 25 coordinated campaign offices throughout Arizona and Nevada, with more than 220 full-time staff.
In Nevada, we run the nation’s largest operation of coordinated campaigns, with 13 offices and nearly 100 staff in the field. We’ve also seen an unprecedented surge of volunteerism over the past few weeks: hours after Vice President Kamala Harris announced her presidential campaign.more than 600 volunteers signed up to support the campaign. Shortly after Vice President Harris announced his candidacy, the campaign held a weekend of action that saw more than 1,000 volunteers take action with the campaign, reaching nearly 50,000 voters across the country by knocking on doors and working the phones.
In Arizona, the campaign has 12 coordinated offices with six more to come—the most Arizona coordinated campaigns in history. The campaign has hired more than 120 full-time staffers, with offices in every corner of the state from border communities like Nogales to rural areas like Kingman. With a popular message and a strong record on the issues most important to voters, Vice President Harris has seen support in Arizona in the form of registrations and volunteer endorsements. As of July 21, 20,899 Arizonans have gone online to join the campaign. And during the July action weekend, the campaign and the coordinated campaign of the Arizona Democrats launched 26 canvasses and hosted a total of 67 events from rural Arizona to Midtown Phoenix.
Harris and Walz have hundreds of paid staffers in two states who contact voters and cast ballots. Trump hopes that outside groups will fill the void for him.
If this election remains close, the ground game will decide the winners and losers of the country’s war, and without a strong coordination effort, the Republicans could be headed for the disaster that Donald Trump created by scrapping the party’s ground game.
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Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and the American Political Science Association
