The Trump campaign's big bet on a new GOTV strategy worries some Republicans
Former President Donald Trump’s campaign thinks its new get-out-the-vote strategy will serve as a silver bullet to capture key battleground states.
Former President Donald Trump’s campaign thinks its new get-out-the-vote strategy will serve as a silver bullet to capture key battleground states. But increasingly concerned Republicans fear the Trump team is firing blanks.
The former president’s campaign has unleashed an untested canvassing and voter-contact model that could reap a big payoff if successfully executed. Gone are the days of the Republican National Committee leading the charge and aiming to hit the highest number of contacts possible.
Now, the Trump team is tailoring its effort, carried out in conjunction with outside groups, to be focused primarily on what it has dubbed “low-propensity voters” — the people who are showing up in poll after poll saying they did not vote in 2020 but are breaking Trump’s way by a significant margin this time.
Meanwhile, an opinion issued by the Federal Election Commission earlier this year allowed for campaigns and outside groups to work more closely on voter turnout efforts. Though full coordination is not permitted, the ruling allowed for this less-regulated money to play a much bigger role in this space.
“The campaign is really rigorously focused on a relatively small but very important group of voters to turn out that are pretty disconnected from politics,” said a senior Trump campaign official who made a point to note that the combined effort knocked on 1 million doors in battleground states this past week. “Traditional field efforts at the RNC had really focused on just volume as much as possible, and that ultimately dictates, operationally, a series of choices where a lot of these folks get missed.”
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