The big Republican weakness no one is talking about
The party has invested very little in its "ground game" in the states
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Even with the U.S. presidential election suddenly lively again, there’s one really important topic that is receiving very little coverage. And that is the vast disparity in personnel and money that the Democrats and Republicans are putting into mobilizing their voters in key states. Put simply: the Democrats are everywhere, and the Republicans seem to be almost nowhere.1
Every election cycle, the parties put together what is often called a “ground game”. This is the operation in each swing state to identify, communicate with, and mobilize the party’s voters in order to make sure that they vote the “right” way. Parties typically open offices staffed by both paid employees and volunteers in order to get to know a particular community, identify likely voters, and persuade them to turn out. A party might have dozens of such offices in a really important state.
There’s some debate over how much this matters, and particularly whether it’s a good use of money as opposed to running TV ads or some other form of campaigning. The Obama campaign’s ground game in 2008 and 2012 - based on mobilizing huge numbers of volunteers and on “AI” voter targeting tools - achieved something of a mythical status. I remember reading a book published in about 2014 which claimed that from now on presidential elections were going to be really boring because they would just be won by whoever had the best voter targeting algorithm.
As you might remember, that doesn’t really describe what actually happened in 2016. Instead, Hillary Clinton inherited Obama’s model and had something like three times as many campaign offices as Trump - then still lost. In 2020, the situation was reversed. Biden’s campaign mostly eschewed traditional door-knocking because of the coronavirus pandemic, while Trump invested in it heavily. Trump had something like 40,000 volunteers knocking on doors in Michigan and Biden had none, but Biden still won.
Because it’s impossible to observe another timeline in which things were done differently, it’s hard to say what all of this means. Maybe Clinton would have lost by a lot more without her 2016 ground game - after all, she did win the popular vote and only lost out on the Electoral College by a few thousand votes. And maybe the extremely unusual circumstances of the 2020 election (particularly the ubiquity of mail-in voting) were what enabled Biden to win that year without much of a ground game. There’s certainly a lot of political science research supporting the idea that individual voter contact is one of the best tools of mobilization and persuasion - and even in 2020, the Biden folks were doing that over the phone, if not in person.
All that been said, it seems like it would be a big risk to abandon ground games. But that is basically what the Republican Party has done this year. Per The Wall Street Journal:
[Republicans argue] that trying to play catch up with the Democratic canvassing machine, which has long had vast resources and is deeply rooted in states across the country, was a losing game. Now the GOP is focused on efficiency, not the size of the operation.
“The practical reality is the program devolved to mostly paid staff grinding out door knocking and phones, and it was all about volume, volume, volume, driving as much volume as possible,” said James Blair, a top strategist for the Trump campaign. “There’s not good evidence that all voter contacts are created equal.”
But the party’s field organizing is so small that some local Republican officials say they are anxious it won’t be enough. The RNC has anywhere from a dozen to two dozen offices in battleground states, while President Biden’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee have about 200 across the country, with nearly 50 here in Wisconsin alone.
There seem to be a number of reasons why the campaign is taking this gamble. It claims that the main reason is that Trump is so popular with the party base that they’ll all turn out to vote anyway and so any money spent on mobilization would be wasted. Trump doubtlessly believes this, but it’s not clear everyone else in the party is so convinced. In fact, the GOP had a plan for a traditional ground game but then tore it up - and a big reason for it doing so seems to have been that Trump’s legal fees had become so large that the campaign was struggling to pay them.
Trump has also directed that the campaign spend huge sums of money on “election security”, which means training poll observers to combat the election fraud which is almost entirely a figment of his imagination. Finally, the party is relying on outside groups like Turning Points USA and a mysterious group called America PAC to contact voters, a sign of how the party itself is strapped for cash and outsourcing core functions to other conservative organizations.
The GOP’s approach is, at the minimum, risky. The idea that Trump is such a big motivating force that no ground game is needed is particularly dubious. Trump reportedly didn’t like the massive bureaucratic monster that his campaign became in 2020, but eleven million more voters turned out for him in 2020 versus 2016, when the campaign was run on more of a shoestring. That figure was influenced by many factors, but discounting the impact of the ground game entirely seems unwise. And you don’t have to look far to find plenty of anonymous quotes by state-level Republican officials who are worried as well.
The decision to run a minimalist ground game also seems to be a product of over-confidence. Per The Washington Post in May of this year:
Trump’s team has also argued that it doesn’t have the same need for a massive field operation as Biden, who is suffering from lower-than-expected support in early public polls among core Democratic groups such as Black and younger voters. Meanwhile, the Biden operation says it has already opened more than 150 offices across nine state and hired over 400 people, many of whom gathered last week in Wilmington, Del., for a strategy session.
“Joe Biden is a guy whose coalition is fractured and at war with itself on a good day,” Blair said. “Much of the rest of his base is unmotivated to turn out to vote.”
But one thing you can say about the entry of Harris into the race in Biden’s place is that it has turbo-charged the level of enthusiasm at the Democratic grassroots - the amount of organizing going on by left-wing civic organizations right now has been described by many participants as unprecedented, and is already showing up in record-breaking fund raising hauls. Suddenly, the Democratic coalition looks unified and energized, and that could be a major problem for the GOP if they counted on it being otherwise.
Anyway, I’m not trying to sell a simplistic narrative here - something like “Dems will win because of their ground game!” This is all just data to include in your mental model of what is happening this year. None of it is necessarily vital to the outcome - but it might be! But one thing I can say for sure - when it comes to the ground game this year, I’d rather be the Democrats than the Republicans.
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This post was inspired by a question on Twitter by the British journalist Ian Dunt, who writes the
newsletter - check it out, particularly if you’re a British politics nerd.