The polls still show Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump in a close race both nationally and in most swing states. With the results likely falling on a knife’s edge, the deciding factor may well be which side is best able to drive voters to the polls. But if that’s the case, Republicans are acting at a disadvantage that can only be ascribed to Trump himself.
Republicans are acting at a disadvantage that can only be ascribed to Trump himself.
Modern elections are more of an “election month” in many states, with early voting and mail-in ballots offering opportunities to cast votes long before Election Day. This was previously a nonpartisan issue, but things have been thrown into disarray for Republicans since Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign. Democratic-led states in particular had moved to set up more ballot drop boxes, pre-emptively send out mail-in ballot request forms and otherwise help people vote safely in the middle of a pandemic.
Naturally, Trump quickly began falsely claiming that mail-in voting leads to mass voter fraud, a claim that formed the backbone of his attempts to overturn his loss that year and soured many of his supporters on early voting. No such mass fraud has ever been discovered, but that hasn’t stopped Trump from periodically returning to the matter. There are times when he’s managed to stop promoting conspiracy theories long enough to praise early voting — but he always returns to old habits soon enough. Just two weeks ago, he told a crowd in Pennsylvania, a state he needs to win, that early voting is “stupid.”
Republicans have begun to realize how much Trump’s rhetoric is impeding their efforts to stockpile votes before polls open next month. “The whole idea behind absentee voting is you’re banking that vote, you’ve got that person, you know they’re going to vote for you, you get them off the list,” Republican strategist Mark Graul recently told Politico. “This is how you get the extra 5,000, 10,000 votes that may decide the election.”
Rather than heed that advice, the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee have focused on Election Day. An increased reliance on day-of turnout would be a risk any year, but especially given how Trump has bound the RNC’s hands ahead of this election. Upon becoming the nominee this year, Trump decreed that the GOP should invest less in traditional get-out-the-vote efforts in favor of more “election integrity” programs.
The resulting cuts have led to outsourcing most turnout programs to outside groups, taking advantage of newly revised Federal Election Commission rules that allow increased cooperation between campaigns and super PACs. Those outside groups haven’t exactly been impressive in their efforts, leading some battleground Republicans to question how effective they’ll actually prove at getting people to the polls. For example, Turning Point USA, the group run by conservative activist Charlie Kirk, has told Semafor that its lofty goals for voter outreach had been narrowed to mostly focus on Arizona and Wisconsin.
The Elon Musk-backed group America PAC has shown the most promise so far, hiring veteran GOP operatives and spending more than $50 million on voter engagement this cycle. That money has gone into hiring hundreds of canvassers in swing states like Michigan and North Carolina. America PAC also on Monday put even more of Musk’s money on the table, promising $47 for each registered voter recruited to sign a petition pledging support for the First and Second amendments, building out the group’s engagement lists.
The Trump campaign, for its part, points to the unpaid “Trump 47 Captains” it’s recruiting to prove it isn’t fully giving up the GOTV game. “Each volunteer initially receives a list of 10 neighbors to mobilize,” The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell wrote about the program, which offers campaign merchandise to those who hit their goals. “If they meet that target, the next tier involves canvassing 24 out of 50 likely Trump voters, followed by canvassing 45 out of 100 voters, with new perks at each tier.” (If that sounds like the same framework as a multilevel marketing scam to you, don’t worry, I’m right there with you.)
It’s an idea also being pushed on a website called 10xVotes, which encourages conservatives to “find 10 friends who don’t vote.” The site, which is available in a few swing states, including Michigan and Arizona, appears to draw from voting records to allow users to search for registered Republicans nearby to “claim” for contact. It’s unclear who exactly owns 10xVotes, which has been pushed by the likes of former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast. Republican operatives aren’t feeling especially confident about the ground game that’s in place in key states. The Trump campaign appears to be working off a theory wherein if it can’t win over the swing voters that Harris is also courting, it can draw out the sort of “low propensity voters” who propelled him to office in 2016 — for example, the cringeworthy push to court young, white males, the kind who feel disaffected but love the hypermasculinity offered on right-wing podcasts and in the MMA ring. One major issue with that strategy: These are also exactly the voters who can’t be counted on to turn out on Election Day without frequent contact. Taken together, Republican operatives aren’t feeling especially confident about the ground game that’s in place in key states. As National Review’s Noah Rothman has noted, the efforts are looking more like 2012 GOP candidate Mitt Romney’s doomed initiative than President Barack Obama’s dominant GOTV program that year. Other candidates might be thinking about shifting where their funds are going to offset those worries. Not Trump, though, not when he’s ready to blame a failure to win enough votes on what Axios described as a “detailed catalog of excuses for rejecting the results of the 2024 election — if he loses.” The guarantee that this will be his response to a loss helps explain his overall nonchalance about getting people to their polling places. After all, it’s much easier (and cheaper) to try to throw out Democratic votes than bother paying people to knock on doors.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on politics and policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House. 
