Washington
Tech billionaire Elon Musk has placed a huge bet on boosting former President Donald Trump’s campaign ground game – but it’s an open question whether that wager will pay off.
Mr. Musk has dropped just shy of $75 million into America PAC since July, according to documents filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) this week, making him one of the biggest-spending supporters of the former president in this campaign cycle. His group has spent more than $110 million in all, most of it on get-out-the-vote operations to boost Mr. Trump’s fortunes. The new super PAC is coordinating closely with the Trump campaign to spur voter turnout in the key presidential battleground states for the former president, taking advantage of new FEC guidance that for the first time allows close coordination between campaigns and outside groups.
But the brand-new organization appears to be scrambling to build out a robust field program to supplement a Trump campaign field operation that’s significantly smaller than it was in 2020 – one that Republicans privately fret could be swamped by a robust turnout game from Vice President Kamala Harris and her allies. Turnout could well determine who wins the 2024 presidential election, which polls show is a tied race in most battleground states. Mr. Musk is known for taking big risks and novel approaches in his enterprises, from Tesla to the social platform X to SpaceX, that only sometimes pay off. And with no time for a second try, there are signs that this particular operation isn’t yet where he might want it to be.
With less than three weeks until Election Day and early voting already underway in many swing states, America PAC still listed open jobs in nearly 50 metro areas on its website as of Thursday, though a source familiar with its operations said that just showed the group was continuing to scale up further and that it is exceeding internal metrics laid out in July.
America PAC fired its initial vendors in July and only really ramped up its efforts in August after Mr. Musk endorsed Mr. Trump. In September, it fired and replaced its vendors in Arizona and Nevada, and has reportedly been beset by some tech problems.
“It’s not 100% as good, probably, as they would like it to be or we would like it to be – but it’s a lot of added coverage regardless,” one senior Trump campaign aide says about Mr. Musk’s group. “Any time you’re hiring lots of people [quickly] and covering lots of ground, you’re going to have a little bit of garbage in there, a little bit of bad performance. But it’s at the margins.”
Others are more concerned. Republican strategists in a half-dozen swing states and nationally say that while America PAC is stepping in to fill an urgent need, the late start undercuts their efforts and hurts Mr. Trump’s chances. Many declined to be named for fear of being publicly critical of political allies.
“I am concerned about the late start and all the hiccups they’ve had in switching teams and vendors,” says one former Trump campaign official who worked on the 2020 race.
Musk avoids a focus on TV ads
Super PACs have traditionally spent most of their money on big TV ad buys, but Mr. Musk has long been deeply skeptical of the power of advertising – Tesla has never run TV ads – and saw a better opportunity to boost Mr. Trump.
And on paper, it’s a smarter investment: Since candidates themselves get much lower prices than outside groups on TV ads, if Mr. Trump’s campaign spends more of its hard money on ads and outside groups pick up the slack on the ground game, it can pay off. This option was created by an FEC ruling this spring that allowed candidates to coordinate much more closely with super PACs – entities that, unlike traditional political action committees, can raise and spend unlimited funds – on get-out-the-vote operations than they had previously been allowed.
But it’s much more difficult, expensive, and time-intensive to build out a field operation than to cut a few TV ads. Staff members have to be hired and trained, and then painstakingly make calls and knock on doors of people identified as likely Trump supporters.
And tech failures can devastate a ground game, impacting the larger campaign. In 2012, Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign poured hundreds of thousands of dollars and a lot of staff hours into ORCA, a voter-targeting platform that was supposed to be a cutting-edge data operation that would let them respond in real time to information on the ground on Election Day. But ORCA crashed on Election Day, leaving the campaign flying blind without critical information.
Both The Guardian and The Washington Post have reported that Campaign Sidekick, the app Mr. Musk’s super PAC is relying on to gather data and log door knocks, has been glitchy and unreliable in areas where cellphone service is limited. According to The Guardian, when users don’t have fast internet connectivity, the app forces canvassers to use “offline walkbooks” that lack a geo-tracking feature and don’t always upload after reconnecting to strong internet, allowing hired door-knockers to potentially cheat by “speed-running” routes and just dropping campaign materials rather than knocking on doors to talk to people.
A GOP field strategist who has recently used the app says its reliability “depends on your location, depends on your city and where you are,” but adds that in their experience it isn’t any worse than other field apps they’ve used.
Trump campaign political director James Blair says the reports of the glitch aren’t accurate. “All tech we are relying on is performing adequately, any issues are immediately addressed, and of course – like any big organization – we have parallel backup systems as a failsafe,” he says.
A ground game for Trump, borrowing a page from DeSantis
Mr. Musk endorsed Mr. Trump immediately after the former president survived an assassination attempt in July. The tech tycoon and world’s wealthiest person has recently ramped up his political efforts in a big way, appearing onstage at a rally with the former president in western Pennsylvania this month, where he called the election “a must-win situation” and claimed that if Mr. Trump doesn’t win, “this will be the last election” in America. He hosted a town hall in suburban Philadelphia on Thursday afternoon to rally support for the president ahead of the state’s voting registration deadline.
“Pennsylvania is, I think, the linchpin of this election, and this election is going to decide the fate of America and along with the fate of America the fate of Western civilization,” Mr. Musk declared onstage Thursday.
While this is the first time in a general election that presidential campaigns have been able to coordinate so closely with super PACs on field operations, a similar framework was used during the primaries – by Trump rival Ron DeSantis. While the Florida governor’s campaign foundered against Mr. Trump, by all accounts its field operations worked well.
Ironically, many of those working at Mr. Musk’s super PAC are veterans of the DeSantis operation. Phil Cox, who ran Mr. DeSantis’ super PAC, and Generra Peck, who served for a time as Mr. DeSantis’ campaign manager, are playing key roles. So is former DeSantis spokesman Andrew Romeo, who traveled with Mr. Musk to Pennsylvania during his recent appearance with Mr. Trump, along with Chris Young, a GOP strategist who led the Republican National Committee’s field program in 2016 and whom Mr. Musk hired as his political consigliere in August. Mr. Romeo, America PAC’s spokesman, declined to comment for this article.
The super PAC is also using a novel workaround to try to circumvent prohibitions on paying people to register to vote. The group is offering supporters $47 for each swing-state voter they can get to sign a petition supporting the First and Second Amendments. The effort is a bank shot to incentivize conservatives to register to vote in those states, though there’s nothing stopping people who are already registered from claiming the money.
Trump is behind Harris in the money race
The effort comes as Mr. Trump’s team is running a leaner ground game than in 2020.
Mr. Trump has badly lagged behind Ms. Harris in fundraising since she entered the race – his campaign raised just over half the amount of money she did over the past three months, new FEC reports show. Her overall campaign staff is about three times the size of his. Mr. Trump’s own field operation is significantly smaller than it was when he lost a high-turnout race in 2020, though it’s much larger than the ragtag 2016 operation that delivered him the White House.
Mr. Trump’s team admits that its campaign is smaller than last time around, though they say this is intentional. ”We have a smaller paid staff than we did in 2020,” one senior Trump campaign staffer says. “That’s by design – 2020 was this massive, bloated operation.”
The campaign has put a much higher emphasis on identifying and targeting lower-propensity voters, looking to turn out the people least likely to vote, rather than focusing on the overall number of door-knocks. Trump campaign co-manager Chris LaCivita told donors in May that the campaign was focusing on “quality over quantity” in its field operations, according to The Washington Post.
Some swing-state chairmen and strategists say the smaller field program won’t be a liability.
“The field operation in Arizona is certainly smaller this cycle compared to four years ago,” says Brian Seitchik, an Arizona Republican strategist who was Mr. Trump’s state director in 2016 and regional political director in 2020.
Mr. Seitchik says a massive ground game would have offered “diminishing returns” because Mr. Trump is so well-defined in his latest White House run. “There really is a finite universe of gettable voters here, and I believe that’s what the campaign is focused on,” he says.
And many Republicans credited outside groups, including Mr. Musk’s, for picking up the slack.
In Michigan, state Republican Party chairman Pete Hoekstra, a former congressman who only took control of the party apparatus in April after a nasty intraparty fight, says efforts have “shifted to the outside groups because we didn’t have a [functioning] political party.” He says the state party, Mr. Musk’s group, other outside groups, and Mr. Trump’s campaign are all sharing the burden.
“The bottom line is we’re not lacking for resources in the state of Michigan. And the numbers are starting to show that,” he says.
Trump campaign says it hasn’t abdicated ground game
Mr. Trump’s campaign praised the work being done by Mr. Musk’s group and other conservative groups that are knocking on doors and making phone calls and said they were working well together, while disputing the idea that the campaign was taking a backseat to Mr. Musk’s operation.
“More is more, and we’re happy to take more [from outside groups], even if it’s imperfect, as long as it’s not hurting us. But the narrative that we’re relying on outside groups is just completely bogus,” says Mr. Blair, the Trump political director. “Our operation is prepared to deliver victory with or without outside support – but we are certainly grateful for all our external allies’ hard work and support and the work they are doing is very helpful.”
Republicans are making up a larger share of the early vote in swing states than four years ago – but that’s an apples-to-oranges comparison because of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, when Democrats flocked to mail-in voting and Mr. Trump discouraged his supporters from using it. Republicans have also made significant gains in voter registration statistics in key swing states including Arizona, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Nevada in recent months; Republicans beat Democrats by more than a two-to-one margin in new voter registrant numbers in the past week, which the Trump campaign was quick to highlight.
Ms. Harris’ campaign, meanwhile, boasts more than 2,500 field staff across more than 350 field offices nationwide – not to mention a constellation of outside groups also helping turn out Democratic-leaning voters.
A Trump campaign official says its campaign has a similar number of offices as Ms. Harris with “many hundreds of staff in the field,” and that its field operation was contacting “well in excess of 2 million” people a week. By comparison In 2020, the RNC and the Trump campaign boasted of making 182 million voter contacts.
Some Republicans are wondering if the effort will work
Mr. Blair says the Trump field program has already collected twice the number of hard IDs for Mr. Trump through field efforts than the entire 2020 campaign, with about three weeks to go until Election Day. “We’re really outperforming in every single battleground state,” he says.
And Mr. Musk’s operation isn’t the only one doing field work for Mr. Trump – Turning Point USA and the Christian conservative Faith and Freedom Coalition are also out helping turn out voters.
But other Republicans aren’t feeling as confident about the combined ground game effort – especially Mr. Musk’s role.
“I’m pretty worried,” says a GOP field specialist who ran a swing state’s field program for the RNC during a past Trump campaign. That strategist had been in touch with people involved in this year’s ground game, and said they saw symptoms of “a thrown-together field program” in Mr. Musk’s efforts.