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Donald Trump's campaign has less money than Kamala Harris', which means he can't go toe-to-toe with her on ads and ground game. So he has adopted a different approach altogether, possibly because he had to, but possibly because his team really believes in it.
In a nutshell, Trump's strategy is based on the belief that a large percentage of the marginal voters and nonvoters are disaffected people who hate both parties and the establishment. He hopes by running as an outsider, he can convince them that he also hates the establishment, so they can potentially be motivated to vote for him.
The strategy is based on an app called 10xVotes that promises to help conservatives find 10 nonvoting friends, family, and neighbors. Trump, J.D. Vance, Tucker Carlson and other conservatives urge audiences to download and use it. The idea is for each person who downloads the app to find 10 people who are marginal or nonvoters and get them to vote. This is the ultimate decentralization of the campaign, but it is essentially free, a real plus when you are being outspent by 3x.
Trump ran a pilot of this plan in Florida in 2020. It targeted Black men in the majority-Black city of Miami Gardens. It put flyers featuring outspoken Democratic opponents of Israel on every Jewish doorstep in South Florida. It bombarded Cuban-Americans and Venezuelan-Americans with messages tying Joe Biden to the socialist dictators of their countries. Trump did win the state by 3.4 points. Did this campaign help? Susie Wiles, who ran the Florida operation, thinks so, and now she is running the entire campaign, along with Chris LaCivita.
Not everyone believes this strategy will work. Veteran Republican operative Dennis Lennox of Michigan said. "It's political malpractice. It's a Hail Mary." Can you really count on people who go to rallies to remember to download the app? Will the app really be able to supply each person with 10 names of potential Trump voters who usually don't vote? How did they build such a database and is it up to date? Paul Hudson, who is running for Congress in Michigan, said: "That strategy would be crazy for anyone else. They're low propensity voters for a reason. But I get the sense they [the Trump campaign] are committed to it."
Another unconventional thing Trump has done is outsource his ground game to other groups. Turning Point USA Action was going to handle the ground game in Arizona, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Then it discovered it didn't have enough money, so it dropped Michigan. A little later it dropped Wisconsin. It is still planning to do Arizona, where the organization is based. If history is any guide, it won't do well there. In 2022, it worked in Arizona for Blake Masters for the Senate and Kari Lake for governor. Both lost. Badly.
Another group that is working on Trump's ground game is the America PAC, which has been funded to the tune of $46 million by Elon Musk. While that is a lot of money, Musk knows next to nothing about running the ground game for a political party and does not take advice easily from those who do know.
Some Democrats say that Trump isn't really trying to win the election by getting more votes. His real strategy is to challenge the results everywhere after the election and get his Supreme Court to hand him the keys to the White House. That's basically what happened in 2000, after all. (V)