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As we have noted several times, the Trump campaign has outsourced its get-out-the-vote (GOTV) operation to third parties. This is unheard of in modern politics, but probably not illegal. If some billionaire wants to spend his own money hiring people to knock on doors and encourage them to vote, it's probably legal as long as the campaign and billionaire don't coordinate.
This is what the Trump campaign has done, although the "not coordinate" part is doubtful since Donald Trump talks to Musk, one of his outsourcers (outsourcerers?) multiple times a week. As long as they just discuss golf and how Melania is taking the campaign and who she will vote for, it is probably OK. If they get into politics, maybe not so OK. In any event, as we have also pointed out a couple of times, while Musk does know a lot about making electric cars and firing rockets into space (and catching them on the way down), he doesn't know much about running a GOTV operation, and it is starting to show.
It works like this. Musk has hired contractors to do the work and shelled out $75 million to them so far. They hire hourly workers at $20/hr to knock on doors. The workers get lists of where they are to go, but they have to provide their own cars to get there and pay for the gas themselves. In some cases, the contractor checks where they are, utilizing an app on their smartphones, but there are other apps the workers can put on their phones to fake their locations so they can cover up the fact that they didn't actually do the work they were assigned. The contractors have auditors who check on the workers. For example, they try to determine if flyers the workers were supposed to deliver actually got delivered. If workers are found cheating, they are fired. But then the contractor has to find and train new workers, which is not easy to do because no one is about to give up an actual job for a 3-week stint canvassing, and unemployment is low. Also, it is not clear that the contractors actually care whether the workers do anything, since the contractors get paid no matter what. It's all about the grift.
Musk's PAC, America PAC, has goals about how many doors its canvassers are supposed to knock on. For example, in Wisconsin, it is 450,000. It is falling far short of that there. The contractors hired by America PAC are having trouble finding people to hire, the ones who are hired often quit quickly (for example, over pay disputes), and again, some of them may be lying about how many people they have contacted.
The focus of America PAC's operation is getting low-propensity voters to the poll. "Low-propensity voters" are people who rarely, if ever, vote, either because it is too much trouble, they think all politicians are crooks, or they believe there is no difference between the parties. Getting them to vote may take more than knocking on their doors and announcing: "Hi, I'm from America PAC. Early voting has started, so time to vote!"
In addition to using Musk for his GOTV operation, Trump also used Turning Point Action (TPA), which was going to handle Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, and Arizona. TPA has already given up on the first three and is now focused only on Arizona. It has some experience there. In 2022, it worked for Kari Lake and Blake Masters. Both were crushed.
Kamala Harris doesn't have so many problems because the campaign itself is running the GOTV operation and it has hundreds of thousands of volunteers who are doing the work because they believe in her, not because they can make a couple of bucks an hour more than they could at McDonald's. (V)