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. 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.”

Concerns, this person said, were coming from Republicans who were used to seeing “a bunch of press releases from the RNC or state GOP” detailing how many doors got knocked. They added the campaign has implemented lessons from its GOTV effort in Iowa, which focused on recruiting “precinct caucus captains.” And it has built a “Swamp the Vote” infrastructure to encourage mail-in balloting among the former president’s voters, this person said.

But as more than a half-dozen Republicans, many with experience in field operations and GOTV efforts, said, there is fear the Trump team doesn’t have enough action going on on the ground, particularly as Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign dwarfs their operation in terms of battleground field offices and staff and as Democrats can count on unions and other issue groups to boost their on-the-ground efforts. They also expressed worries that the outside groups, which have been tasked with so much of the voter engagement portfolio, aren’t doing as much as initially hoped for.

“There have been some of us who always thought it was a bad idea, but wanted to trust the decision and not make waves,” said a veteran Republican who has expressed concerns to Trump’s team about outsourcing so much of the operation. “I think we are seeing some of those concerns become reality to an extent.”

“I think Trump still can and will win, but there are needless complications we are seeing,” the person added.

Operatives in both parties have long said that door-knocking and other forms of voter engagement — including phone-banking, text messaging and mailers — can make a difference on the margins of an election, perhaps boosting that party’s turnout by about 1%. But with recent presidential elections in the key swing states determined by such small margins, the difference could well come down to which side has the more successful ground operation.

“There is no tangible evidence that Trump and the RNC have invested in the kind of ground game that you need in a turnout election,” a Republican operative in a swing state said. “Local Republicans aren’t being asked to knock doors, make phone calls, text voters or even harvest mail-in ballots. Instead, they’re being asked to be poll watchers in Republican counties or localities with Republican clerks.”

But the Trump team and its allies say these Republicans simply aren’t looking in the right place. The campaign has partnered with a number of outside groups to help drive its ground efforts, including Turning Point Action, America First Works and America PAC, an Elon Musk-aligned super PAC that may be doing the most work of any.

FEC records show America PAC has spent more than $52 million so far on voter engagement efforts and hired prominent GOP canvassing outfits — Blitz Canvassing, The September Group and In Field Strategies. It’s backed by donations from James John Liautaud, the founder of Jimmy John’s; Shaun Maguire and Douglas Leone of Sequoia Capital; and the Winklevoss twins, among others.

America PAC is actually being led by two GOP operatives who played a big role in Gov. Ron DeSantis’ campaign: Generra Peck and Phil Cox, as The New York Times first reported.

“Since the FEC ruling, there’s a general confusion amongst the old guard over what is going on,” a Republican operative working on a pro-Trump voter engagement effort said. “Now that it’s not working exactly how it always used to, people are confused, so they’re claiming that this is not good versus it simply being a change in the parties that are doing the work. You can have more innovative work when it’s done this way than you have when you’re confined to the old structure. So I just think that’s super overblown criticism by people who don’t know what they’re talking about.”

‘Some groups are better than others’

Concerns over Republican field efforts are nothing new. As an NBC News investigation last year found, the party was spending millions on turnout operations that insiders said suffered from significant flaws and lax oversight. Large-scale conservative canvassing efforts, these Republicans explained, were plagued with issues including fraudulent and untrustworthy data entries. But Republicans have insisted on its usefulness when done well, while major donors have been willing to fund the efforts.

One Trump campaign staffer said the focus on low-propensity voters instead of having goals built around reaching the largest number of voters possible has eliminated incentives to submit fraudulent data entries, adding that complaints are coming from operatives who have been “cut out” of high-dollar contracts.

“From my understanding, everything is going well,” this person said. “Some states are running better programs than others. … I’ve heard grumbling from people complaining, but a lot of them are just mad they aren’t able to grift off the campaign.”

But one group that has long been the subject of Republican scrutiny for its ground game promises is Turning Point, which set a goal earlier this year of spending more than $100 million on a “Chase the Vote” program. Now, the group told Semafor, its effort will be more narrowly focused and mostly in Arizona, where it is headquartered, and Wisconsin.

“I wish we had the resources to blanket Michigan and to blanket Nevada and blanket Georgia, like we’re doing [in] Arizona [and] Wisconsin,” Andrew Kolvet, a Turning Point Action spokesperson, said in a statement to Semafor. “But barring a last minute major infusion of resources we’re just simply not able to staff those regions like we’d want to.”

Turning Point Action did not respond to requests for comment from NBC News. One Republican operative with experience in field operations said the statement from the group in Semafor validated warnings that Republicans shared with Trump about Turning Point for months — and contributed to the campaign’s ramp-up of its in-house program in recent weeks.

The senior Trump campaign official said the campaign was not caught off guard by Turning Point having a more limited scope, saying it has been working closely with the organization.

“Some groups are better than others,” this person said more broadly.

Michael Whatley, chairman of the Republican National Committee, defended both the relationships with outside groups to help turn out the vote and the internal operation that is directly run by the RNC and the Trump campaign, which have long functionally been merged.

“We have more opportunities to have additional resources that other groups have in place,” he said. “We have a big, robust get-out-the-vote operation in house, but we are also working with third parties.”

Earlier this month, the Trump campaign presented a detailed review of its GOTV and field program to House Republicans, a source familiar with the call said. Additionally, a campaign source with direct knowledge of the GOTV strategy said the field program will naturally grow as the election nears but added there was a renewed sense of urgency with the race tightening as Harris replaced President Joe Biden.

“I’m feeling good about the ground game,” Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said. “I am concerned about the financial gap after you saw Kamala Harris transfer $10 million from the presidential campaign to the Democrats’ Senate races. … Our biggest challenge right now is getting the resources out on the front lines to win.”

Poll watchers vs. canvassers

Republicans have also raised concerns that Trump’s efforts to spend more on election integrity efforts, spurred by his false belief in the 2020 election being stolen, have left GOTV efforts underfunded and undermanned. More volunteers, these Republicans said, are being trained to be poll watchers rather than canvassers. Trump, meanwhile, has publicly suggested he has all the votes he needs while insisting the key to his victory will be monitoring the returns.

“We want to be in the room,” Whatley said of having RNC paid staff and volunteers in areas where ballots are counted. “We have recruited over 175,000 volunteers all across the country. We are training them and we are going to be deploying them as ballot workers and ballot observers.”

The Trump campaign sees Democrats as actually having the trickier hand, though, when it comes to GOTV — mostly because they see a decline in mail-in-ballot requests compared with 2020, which of course was at the peak of the Covid pandemic. Democrats this time will have to get more of their voters to the polls who may never have voted in person before, the senior campaign official said. This person also said they were encouraged by voter registration numbers and pointed to the campaign itself having registered 90,000 voters in battleground states in the last two months.

“The deliverables, the actions you would want taken by a voter that would be a downstream indicator, … are clearly on our side,” this person said.

But like others who spoke with NBC News, the Republican operative with experience in field operations isn’t sold, noting that even with a massive ground game in 2020, Trump fell short in the key battlegrounds.

“You gotta remember, Donald Trump got more votes for a sitting president than ever before in history,” this person said. “Now you don’t have people out there squeezing all the juice out of the orange. They’re just focused on this very small universe of [low-propensity] voters. And so you’re leaving everything to the chance that swing voters aren’t going to be persuaded by the left.”