Dem
49
GOP
51
Traditionally, campaigns try to get as many voters to the polls as they can from areas that lean toward them. There is not a lot of cherry-picking. If your zip code leans in their direction, the party will try to get you to the polls. Volume has always been king.
Donald Trump's campaign is planning on using a different strategy this time. It believes that the key to winning is to get low-propensity voters to the polls because it believes they favor him. The idea is somehow to trade quantity for quality. Some Republicans think this is a bad idea. At the very least, how do you locate these people and motivate them? That's why no campaign has ever tried it before.
In addition, the campaign has outsourced much of the voter contact work to third parties. Normally, campaigns and outside groups may not coordinate at all, but this spring, the Federal Election Commission ruled that parties and outside groups can have some limited coordination about getting people to the polls. The Trump campaign has taken this to heart and given contracts for millions of dollars to outside groups to contact voters. At least one investigation showed that the work done by the outside groups was deeply flawed, with some of the workers hired not contacting any voters at all. To some extent, the problem is caused by the Democrats having vast numbers of dedicated volunteers who do their assigned work because they believe in it while Republicans don't. So the Republicans have to pay people to do it, and some of them take the money but don't do the work. Another problem is that when a campaign outsources basic work that campaigns normally do, it is introducing the possibility of grift.
One group that has long been subject to scrutiny is Turning Point, which promised to spend $100 million on its "Chase the Vote" program in all the swing states. Now it is mostly focused on Arizona and a little bit on Wisconsin. It says it doesn't have the resources to operate in the other states.
However, another group may be more effective. Elon Musk has his own personal super PAC, America PAC. Armed with $30 million, it has been working on GOTV in swing states. It does door-knocking, mailers, and digital ads. It could be that Musk doesn't trust Trump to do GOTV correctly, so he has taken it upon himself to do it instead. Maybe he really hopes Trump wins and he will be appointed Secretary of Everything.
Still another issue is that the RNC is putting a huge focus on training volunteers and paid staff to be ballot workers and ballot observers. These people would normally be out in the field talking to voters.
The consequence of having a limited GOTV goal and then outsourcing the work to outside groups that use paid canvassers who don't always do what they are paid to do, could be that the Republican GOTV operation may not work well. It could end up being dwarfed by the Harris and DNC operation, which is based on hundreds of thousands of volunteers and aims at the greatest possible volume, rather than focusing on a narrow group of people who, by definition, tend not to vote.
And there is another potential fly in the ointment here. Many of the unlikely voters are young. Turnout among seniors is often >80% whereas among 18-29-year-olds it is often <50%. Roughly half of the young nonvoters are women. These are precisely the people who could be moved to vote by Taylor Swift's endorsement of Kamala Harris. One study of Oprah Winfrey's endorsement of Barack Obama in 2008 suggested that Winfrey added 1 million votes to Obama's total. Could Swift do the same thing for Harris? We do know that in the 24 hours after Swift told her fans to go register at vote.gov, 400,000 people visited the website. We don't know how many actually registered and how many will vote, but the Republicans are not the only ones aiming at low-propensity voters. Yesterday, Trump wrote: "I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT" on his money-losing social media site. Maybe he is on to something. (V)