The ground game: Harris’ turnout machine vs. Trump’s unproven alliance

In the final weeks of the 2024 election, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are staking their chances on two radically different theories of how to win: one tried-and-true, the other untested in modern presidential campaigns.

Harris’ team is running an expansive version of the type of field operation that has dominated politics for decades, deploying flotillas of paid staff members to organize and turn out every vote they can find. Trump’s campaign is going after a smaller universe of less frequent voters while relying on well-funded but inexperienced outside groups to reach a broader swath.

Interviews with more than four dozen voters, activists, campaign aides and officials in four pivotal counties — Erie County, Pennsylvania; Kenosha County, Wisconsin; Maricopa County, Arizona; and Cobb County, Georgia — reveal a diffuse, at times unwieldy Republican effort that has raised questions from party operatives about effectiveness in the face of the more tightly structured Harris campaign operation. Democrats, in many places, are outpacing Republicans in terms of paid staff and doors knocked, and are counting on that local presence to break through a fractured media environment and to reach voters who want to tune out politics altogether.

With 2,500 staff members located in 353 offices, the Harris campaign is working to convert the strongest backers into volunteers and to ensure that sporadic but supportive voters cast a ballot, all while winning over independents and moderate Republicans. Last week, the campaign said, it knocked on over 600,000 doors and made over 3 million calls through 63,000 volunteer shifts.

Trump’s team is largely operating under the assumption that Republicans who voted for Trump in previous elections will once again back him in large numbers. His campaign is focusing on a smaller number of infrequent voters who his team believes will back Trump if energized to vote. The campaign says it has “hundreds of paid staff” and over 300 offices across the battleground states. A top Republican strategist who spoke to campaign leaders, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the operations, said the campaign was training 40,000 volunteers, called “Trump Force 47 captains,” who were each charged with mobilizing 25 of these less likely voters — for a total reach of 1 million voters.

“What is very impactful is personal contacts with voters who don’t reliably vote in every election that are more disconnected from the political process,” said James Blair, the Trump campaign’s political director.

Outside organizations and super political action committees funded by conservative donors are picking up efforts to reach even more voters. Prominent among them are Turning Point Action, an organization of young conservatives led by Charlie Kirk, a Trump ally, and America PAC, a super PAC affiliated with Elon Musk — both of which have little experience running field programs — as well as the Faith and Freedom Coalition, a more veteran Christian organization that is focused on engaging conservative evangelical voters.

A door-to-door strategy that so heavily relies on third-party efforts has never been seen before in a presidential campaign. Trump’s team is taking advantage of a Federal Election Commission decision earlier this year that for the first time allows the campaigns and these types of organizations to coordinate on canvassing operations.

It’s also a financial necessity: Trump has raised far less in campaign cash than Harris. Musk’s group alone is seeded with tens of millions of dollars of the billionaire’s own funds.

Here’s a closer look at counties that could decide the election:

In Erie County, Pennsylvania, a disjointed Republican operation is plagued by infighting. If there’s one thing that Republican leaders of Erie County, Pennsylvania, seem to hate more than Harris, it’s the other Republican leaders of their bellwether county in the pivotal state’s northwest corner.

The divisions are open, acrimonious and may be hindering efforts to register voters and get out the vote for Trump, who won this key swing county in 2016 but lost it to President Joe Biden in 2020. The infighting, according to interviews with multiple people involved, is a byproduct of the Trump campaign’s decision to largely leave its ground game not only to local Republican Party offices but also to a variety of outside groups, all with their own methodologies and demands for attention.

Tom Eddy, the Erie County Republican Party chair, appears to be at war with a core group of Republican activists who have styled themselves as the mainstay of the party’s ground game in the county. Eddy calls those activists self-promoters and cranks.

The activists, led by a Trump superfan, Brian Shank, call Eddy mean and stodgy.

“I don’t know if it hurts,” said Harrison Dunn, a young Republican activist in Erie County who founded his own super PAC allied with Shank to promote Republicans in the region. “It doesn’t help, which is its own kind of hurt.”

At times, the groups are right on top of each other. Outside a Trump rally in Erie, a tent pitched by one group abutted the tent of another — and both were shouting at passersby to register to vote or sign up for mail-in ballots.

The day before, Shank, a former member of the County Council who was ousted by a Democrat in November, and Kimberly Hunter, a co-founder of Dunn’s super PAC, Restore America, stood for hours at Dobbins Landing, a popular spot on Erie’s waterfront, with about a dozen Trump-flag-waving compatriots from the 814 Patriots Group, another organization of the former president’s supporters. Shank’s trailer featured a rickety mannequin of Trump in a disheveled suit and tie, dark glasses and a red Make America Great Again hat that nonetheless attracted passersby eager to climb a small aluminum ladder to pose for pictures.

As they did, Hunter asked whether they were registered to vote and pressed them to take applications for mail-in ballots. Dunn, meanwhile, bragged about pushing the county to clean up its voter rolls after the 2020 election, resulting in a purge of 13,499 Democrats.

“The Republican Party’s not doing anything,” Shank said. “We are.”

At Erie County Republican headquarters in Millcreek Township, outside the city of Erie, Eddy was openly dismissive of those efforts. Three staff members hired by the Trump campaign under the “Trump Force 47” banner were the real muscle behind the Republican ground game in the county, he said.

On a recent Saturday morning, out of the county Democratic headquarters in downtown Erie, two successive waves of canvassers went out to persuade the undecided. About 120 canvassers, bolstered by union members from as far away as Buffalo, New York, checked in for the first wave. Another 60 to 70 came two hours later.

“It’s a little scary and intimidating to knock on doors, but really, it’s been good,” said Conrad Kubaney, 33, who along with his wife, Susie Guisto, 27, has gotten involved in a presidential campaign for the first time, knocking doors for Harris. “There’s a sense that we’re not taking anything for granted.”

In Cobb County, Georgia, Democrats target the voters who helped power their narrow 2020 victory.

The rush of supporters arriving for phone bank and door-knocking shifts on a warm Saturday in October caused a traffic jam in the parking lot of a Harris campaign outpost in Mableton, Georgia.

The crush of cars forced volunteers and staff members to direct traffic for several minutes while groups of canvassers left the office with piles of pro-Harris placards in hand, making room for fresh faces to trickle in.

The sheer number of enthusiastic supporters showing up in Cobb County — the racially diverse corner of the populous Atlanta suburbs that helped drive Biden’s win in the state four years ago — was indicative of the renewed energy Harris’ candidacy has given the party. Democrats in Georgia are targeting as many people as possible, from staunch liberals in the heart of Atlanta to independents and even moderate Republicans in the city’s suburbs and exurbs. The campaign boasts 26 offices statewide, complete with 200 paid staff members.

The razor-thin margins that could decide the election were laid bare at the doors, however.

Standing on her front porch, Agnes McGhee, 75, said that she planned to support Harris this November. Originally from Trinidad, she was motivated to secure her citizenship after hearing Trump’s speeches demonizing immigrants. His remarks compelled her to do what she could to vote him out, she said.

Just across the street, canvassers with Harris’ campaign were quickly rebuffed by a woman who shouted through her window that her family would be voting for Trump in November.

They moved to the next house.

Trump-allied Turning Point focuses on Maricopa County, Arizona.

Dave Heidebrecht walked along the sidewalk of an upscale neighborhood in Gilbert, Arizona, smiling in satisfaction. He had just rung the doorbell of a house in the triple-digit October heat, hoping to ensure that a woman living there had a plan to vote for Trump.

Her name was on a list of roughly 1,000 infrequent voters who Heidebrecht, 56, a full-time canvasser for Turning Point Action, was responsible for corralling in the East Valley area of Phoenix.

Instead he found her son, 18-year-old Duy Pham, who was also planning on voting for Trump but needed some clarity on how to turn in his ballot.

“I almost view myself as a holy kick in the pants,” Heidebrecht said.

Outside groups like his say they are swarming to help boost Trump around the sprawling Phoenix suburbs.

The Faith and Freedom Coalition had knocked on more than 195,000 doors throughout the state as of early October, with about 75 paid staff members and 100 volunteers working there, according to a person familiar with the group’s efforts. Musk’s America PAC said it knocked on about 250,000 doors in Arizona earlier this summer but declined to share updated figures. And Ashley Hayek, executive director of America First Works, said her conservative group had knocked on 345,000 doors so far in Maricopa, with close to 200 volunteers active in Arizona — mostly in Maricopa County — each day.

The Harris campaign has six offices and 54 paid staff members in Maricopa County, and knocked on about 90,000 doors between July and early October, according to Jacques Petit, a spokesperson. That does not account for its many allied groups, like the Unite Here labor union, which began knocking on doors in May and anticipates hitting 900,000 in Maricopa County alone by Election Day, according to Brendan Walsh, executive director of Worker Power, an allied group.

The Trump campaign did not provide specifics as to staff or campaign offices, but said it was knocking on doors — but would not say how many — as it prioritized reaching hard-to-get voters.

All Republican efforts appeared to be dwarfed by Turning Point Action, led by Kirk. Headquartered in Phoenix, Turning Point has been laying the groundwork since February for an all-out “chase the vote” program aimed at turning out Republicans who do not usually vote. It is spending tens of millions of dollars on the effort and ensuring it has staff members in every one of the hundreds of precincts in Arizona it has identified as most crucial.

The organization would not say how many doors it had knocked on, but Tyler Bowyer, its chief operating officer, said it had many hundreds of staff members and thousands of volunteers in Arizona, and was working to turn out about 400,000 people, half of whom are in its high-priority precincts.

Bowyer rejected the notion that Republicans relying on outside groups to motivate voters was a gamble or even a novel approach.

“The question isn’t: Will it work?” Bowyer said. “Not doing it is like working with fewer resources.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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