Trump’s Ground Game Is No Longer In Our Hearts

How the Trump campaign plans to use Democratic canvassing arrangements to get out the vote.

(Composite / Photos: GettyImages / Shutterstock)

DONALD TRUMP’S PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN may have a ground game after all. And if all goes as planned, Trump will have a George Soros–backed political committee and the Democrats’ top election-law firm to thank.

For months, Trump was criticized over his small staff and the Republican National Committee’s layoffs and shuttered field offices. But since May, his campaign has quietly been in talks with more than three dozen conservative groups to outsource parts of its voter turnout operation. This would be a first-of-its-kind effort.

Cost: $100 million, at least.

Total paid canvassers: 3,000, at least.

The twist: It can all be financed with unlimited corporate dollars and untraceable dark money from political nonprofits that are otherwise off-limits to a federal campaign. 

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This type of arrangement between federal campaigns and outside groups used to be forbidden, but the rules changed under a March 20 Federal Election Commission advisory opinion, sought by the Democratic group Texas Majority PAC and the Elias Law Group. That opinion  may turn out to fundamentally change the way federal political campaigns mobilize voters for years to come. It was also a lifeline to the Trump campaign, which was hurting for cash and facing President Biden’s mammoth operation, which has 150 field offices, 400 staffers, and a massive volunteer army across the battleground states.

“Everyone’s chasing the Biden shiny object of, ‘We’re opening offices and hiring staff.’ But they’re missing the big picture,” James Blair, the Trump campaign’s political director in charge of field operations, told The Bulwark. “We’re going to beat them at their own game. They thought they were helping themselves, but they’re actually helping us.”

Or at least, that’s what the Trump campaign is telling itself.

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Some Democrats acknowledge that the FEC’s opinion gave the Trump campaign a boost, but they all believe the Trump campaign is spinning about how effective the new outsourced venture will be. And a few Republican insiders privately worry the Democrats might be right.

Compared to Republicans, Democrats have more third-party groups with far more organizational experience ID’ing voters, walking neighborhoods, knocking on doors, handing out campaign materials to voters, and urging them in face-to-face meetings to cast ballots early in person, by mail, or on Election Day. And outside liberal groups are also well-funded, with one coalition pledging $1 billion to back Biden.

“This is an area where you can’t just add money,” said Jon Berkon, the Elias Law Group attorney who argued the Texas Majority PAC’s case before the FEC.

“You need an organizational structure—whether it’s the party, candidate, or outside groups—to make this work. You need offices, you need a management structure, you need policies, you need detailed protocols for how to collect data and prevent people from goofing off on the job. It is really hard, labor-intensive work,” Berkon said. “And if you haven’t built that infrastructure year, over year, over year, it ain’t gonna work. You can spend all the money that you want, but the question is, ‘Are you actually getting quality contacts with voters at the door?’ If you throw a bunch of money at it, you would probably increase the volume but are you actually doing anything that is effective or useful for you?”

Berkon pointed out that the National Republican Senatorial Committee objected to the advisory opinion he sought, a sign the GOP knew it would benefit Democrats more than Republicans. (The NRSC has since reversed itself; the Trump camp said it was unaware of the NRSC’s prior opposition.) 

The conflicting canvassing approaches of Trump and Biden tells the story of their campaigns organizations.

Biden’s operation is huge, completely in-house, and traditional in its approach. It’s so sure of its program that it’s not yet taking advantage of the FEC opinion in the same way Trump’s campaign has. That’s led to grumbling from some Democratic organizers. One veteran told The Bulwark the Biden campaign’s decision not to coordinate more with outside groups was “crazy and asinine and is the most shortsighted, dumbfounding thing I’ve heard. I mean, it’s crazy.”

Dan Kanninen, Biden’s battleground states director, was (unsurprisingly) skeptical.

“I’m not sure what it looks like to coordinate with a candidate that has no campaign,” Kanninen said. “When you drop late money into a race, it’s like shrapnel bouncing off of satellites. Our campaign has been on the ground in communities for months building relationships and trust and doing it consistently over time. If Donald Trump and his campaign think they can parachute in with outside money in the 11th hour after having built no campaign apparatus, they just don’t understand how this works.”

Blair said the Trump campaign still has its own in-house canvassing program that will work hand-in-glove with groups such as America First Works and Turning Point Action, which hosted Trump last weekend in Detroit. Blair compared the campaign’s role to “air traffic control” in which “we can provide feedback on messaging guidance all the way down the chain.”

Who’s right or wrong? This is why we have elections.

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Trump’s campaign emerged from the GOP primary in March with relatively little money, but a belief that its data operation could effectively handle ground game operations with a small staff. After Trump’s team took over the RNC in March, it laid off dozens of staffers. 

One knowledgeable Republican consultant involved in the 2020 and 2022 campaigns nationwide said the RNC’s footprint in “Tier One” swing states is “more skeletal” compared to four years ago: Some states that had as many as 100 RNC staffers on the ground now have about 20.

“After the Trump coup at the RNC, the question is whether the Trump campaign got caught flat-footed and were lucky to get bailed out by the FEC, or was this their plan all along to roll the dice and work with these groups like Turning Point on the ground?” the Republican consultant asked, cautioning that “experience matters. Technology matters. Organization matters. And staff matters. You have to hire the right people and not a bunch of what we call ‘carnies’ who you just can’t rely on.”

In 2022, for instance, paid canvassers in Las Vegas were supposed to be knocking on doors but instead were discovered gambling eight miles away at Caesar’s Palace casino, according to an NBC News report that detailed multiple Republican ground-game problems in Nevada and Georgia.

To guard against “carnie” mischief, Trump’s campaign made sure its canvassers used a “Walk App” during the GOP primary that allowed the campaign to track workers using geolocation data. The all-in-one app also gives canvassers information on the names, addresses and phone numbers of the voters they are contacting, information about their voting history, and a script to read.

Now, under the FEC opinion, the campaign can share that information with third-party groups for the general election. The opinion does not allow for complete coordination between a campaign and all third-party groups, and it still necessitates the creation of certain firewalls, especially when it comes to advertising and certain types of data sharing.

Two weeks after the opinion was issued, dozens of conservative groups held a summit at the Willard InterContinental in Washington to hammer out an agreement to share data, messaging, grassroots mobilization strategy, and early vote turnout efforts. Convened by America First Works, the April 3 meeting involved influential organizations such as Tea Party Patriots and the Faith and Freedom Coalition. Trump confidants in attendance included former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, former White House adviser and America First Policy Institute founder Brooke Rollins, and former Small Business Administration leader Linda McMahon.

“We’ll be able to be stronger than before,” said Ashley Hayek, executive director of America First Works, the nonprofit political arm of the policy institute. She and former New York Rep. Lee Zeldin, an AFPI board member, met with the Trump campaign at its West Palm Beach office May 3 to begin working together on paid canvassing. 

The new rules came at an opportune time for the Trump campaign, Blair said, because it coincided with a “shift towards ground operations by a number of very well-funded external groups on the right, Super PACs, 501c(4)’s, you name it.  There’s been a big pivot by external groups towards focusing on grassroots efforts.”

Turning Point, based in Arizona, began developing its program after noticing how nearly 100,000 Republican voters in two conservative congressional districts stayed home in 2020 and 2022. Turning Point wants canvassers to find these clusters of low-propensity voters and start persuading them to vote this year.

“What we’re doing is taking the best tactics from the left—from Stacey Abrams, the blueprint in Colorado, relational organizing—to get out the vote of these low-propensity right-leaning voters,” Turning Point spokesman Andrew Kolvet said. But there’s one factor that no app or Trump campaign official can control: the candidate.

Trump has constantly sent mixed messages on voting by mail, which is a Republican strength in states like Florida, from which Blair and other top Trump campaign officials hail. Earlier this month, when the RNC launched its new “Swamp the Vote” program, Trump stuck to the script and appeared to encourage any type of voting method to win. 

But at Turning Point’s gathering Saturday in Michigan, he reverted to type and deemphasized the need for swamping.

“We don’t need votes. We got more votes than anybody’s ever had. We need to watch the vote,” he said. “We need to guard the vote. We need to stop the steal. We don’t need votes. We have to stop—focus, don’t worry about votes. We’ve got all the votes. I was in Florida yesterday—every house has a Trump sign. Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. We have to guard the vote.”