I had been walking the streets of suburban Phoenix for hours and barely seen anyone else on foot. One of the few people I did encounter was a man holding a sign that read “I need ice I’m going to get heatsick again.” It was August, approaching a hundred and fifteen degrees, and I was with Jason Angel, a former marine who was volunteering with Turning Point Action, the grassroots political-advocacy group, to door-knock for Donald Trump. Angel’s goal was to talk to ten registered Republicans who hadn’t voted in the last Presidential election. There are more than two hundred and thirty thousand such Republicans in Arizona; in 2020, Trump lost the state by roughly eleven thousand votes. It was the first time a Democratic Presidential candidate won Arizona since Clinton did in 1996. (Before that: Truman, 1948.) Angel was consulting Turning Point Action’s iPhone app, which displayed a map leading us to the closest so-called low-propensity voters—high chance of voting Republican, slim chance of showing up. They were mostly not answering the door. Angel’s knee was screaming in pain, but he wanted to keep going. “I can hardly damn walk,” he said. “I’m going to have to get over to the V.A.”
In 2016, Trump won three battleground states by less than a point; the same was true for Biden in 2020. It didn’t seem unreasonable for Angel to hope that a few encounters at the margin would be worthwhile. During the stretches in between houses, he told me about Diana Walsh Pasulka, a scholar of religious studies who writes about people’s inclination to believe in U.F.O.s. We arrived at a house that looked promising: two cars were in the driveway, one of them a truck with a model of a .50-calibre bullet mounted on its front hood. “This guy’s my people right here,” Angel said. He made sure his veteran baseball cap was visible in the Ring camera. Then he turned to me and said, “Instead of going out and trying to convert people, let’s talk to folks who are like us.”
Earlier this summer, Trump’s ground game had felt like a bit of an afterthought; he was leading Biden in every swing state and by more than seven percentage points in Arizona, according to Nate Silver’s polling averages. Still, there had been some concern in conservative circles that nothing much was happening for Republicans on the ground. In April, Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, the right-wing non-profit with which Turning Point Action is affiliated, lamented that Biden’s campaign was “superior”; on his popular daily talk-radio show, he questioned whether Trump even had any field offices. “I do not know if we have the infrastructure, if we have the troops, the plumbing, to translate the public sentiment into election success,” he said. When I arrived in Phoenix, the weekend after the Democratic National Convention, Kamala Harris, now atop the ticket, was ahead. By that point, even Trump’s dependable online sycophant Laura Loomer worried that his campaign was fumbling. (“You need a lot more than just ‘Vibes,’ ” she tweeted. “The ground game is not sufficient.”)
In fact, for much of this cycle, neither party invested significantly in ground campaigns. At the end of 2023, Biden had only a tenth as many people on the campaign payroll as Obama had at that point in 2012. (After Harris became the presumptive nominee, in July, a hundred and seventy thousand new Democratic volunteers signed up to help.) The traditional approach to running field operations in a very close race is to flood the state with resources to persuade as many voters as possible; the Trump campaign has by all appearances remained uninterested in volume or broadening its coalition. It has a fraction of the field offices and staff that Harris does, and it has partnered with Turning Point Action and other conservative groups to help execute a ground game that is focussed almost exclusively on reaching voters who are already primed to side with MAGA. (Earlier this year, new guidance from the Federal Election Commission allowed outside groups to work directly with campaigns on get-out-the-vote efforts.) “You’re talking about a race that potentially could be decided by thousands or tens of thousands of votes,” James Blair, the director of political strategy for Trump’s campaign, told me. “The proverbial voter that lives under a rock and would vote for us if they would just come vote—that’s where contacts are most impactful.”
Turning Point Action has raised tens of millions of dollars to fund an army of on-the-ground ballot chasers that it hopes to deploy not just to elect Trump but in perpetuity. “We want this to be the new way to win,” Brett Galaszewski, Turning Point Action’s national enterprise director, told me. “We no longer see this as a war of persuasion amongst swing voters.” He went on, “There’s a turnout problem in the conservative movement. There are people in this country that would give up their vote for a stick of gum. We’re going after those voters, and we’ve identified enough of them to tip the election.” Chris LaCivita, Trump’s campaign co-director, agreed with this approach. “That’s our entire focus,” he told me. “In the past, the R.N.C. would spend tens of millions of dollars chasing the wrong voters, and we’ve totally revamped it.”
Angel and I had met in the graffiti-decorated “kidz zone” of the Jesus People Church in Scottsdale, where Turning Point Action was hosting a training called a Super Chase, something of a branded get-out-the-vote mission that focusses explicitly on these low-propensity Republican voters. Jacob Chacón, the field director leading the session, described the neighborhood we were in as a “hotspot.” He went on, “It’s a lot of Republicans who voted Republican all their life. They voted for John McCain, they voted for Goldwater, they even voted for Trump in 2016 or voted for Republicans in 2022, but they didn’t vote in 2020, or it’s on and off . . . And so we’re trying to make sure all those Republicans get out to vote again.”
Chacón, who is twenty-three years old, and who had worked on Blake Masters’s failed Senate campaign, showed us how to click on the app and access a list of ten to fifteen disengaged voters near us. Chacón was training the volunteers to work alongside Turning Point Action’s professional ballot chasers, full-time staff members who are placed in “super-chase precincts” where four hundred to six hundred disengaged Republicans live. According to the organization’s internal metrics, having a ballot chaser in a precinct led to a twenty-per-cent increase in turnout for the Republican primary. “It takes a bunch of conversations,” Chacón said. “The full-time ballot chasers are in the community on a day-by-day basis over the course of months, making connections with these people. Just because you show up to the door one time doesn’t mean they trust you, right?” They are also hoping these like-minded doorstep confidantes can help coax skeptics to embrace early voting and mail-in voting, tactics Trump has often denigrated. (In 2020, Kirk was one of many stop-the-steal activists who insisted, falsely, that mail-in voting led to rampant fraud.)
When I spoke to Galaszewski, the enterprise director, he told me that the effort was based on a community-organizing model—making people “the C.E.O. of their neighborhood for the conservative movement.” We were standing offstage at a recent Trump rally in Glendale, Arizona, co-hosted by Turning Point Action. Rather than have a steady stream of door-knockers showing up, Turning Point Action liked the idea of embedding one person, who, along with a small group of volunteers, keeps going back to the target. “This is the Obama model at its finest,” Galaszewski said. The Obama campaigns notably engaged volunteers to target low-propensity voters within their communities. Liz McKenna, a professor at Harvard who worked on both of those campaigns, detailed this strategy in a book she co-authored called “Groundbreakers: How Obama’s 2.2 Million Volunteers Transformed Campaigning in America.” In the 2020 cycle, the book was required reading for R.N.C. organizers, who had to take a quiz on it before going into the field in swing states. (When I called McKenna, she pointed out that the Obama strategy also had a “large persuasion component. We were organizing in deep red, rural areas as well.”) “The truth is that the Democrats had a vision,” a Turning Point Action strategist told me. Galaszewksi said, “It’s how our founders intended government to be—close to the people.” Onstage at the rally, Trump was saying, “Make sure they don’t cheat, Charlie.”
In the aftermath of Trump’s defeat in 2020, many operatives in Arizona’s Republican Party insisted it was the electoral system that had failed, not their candidate—the machinery of fair elections, instead of the votes themselves, was seen as the critical problem to address. This spring, when Trump’s campaign effectively merged with the R.N.C., the former President remained committed to that strategy. (According to the Washington Post, Trump reportedly told his team that they need not worry about traditional turnout efforts because he was more than able to motivate supporters himself. “Focus on the cheating,” he said.) The R.N.C., which had been planning to open seven offices and hire twenty-three field organizers in Arizona, instead prioritized poll watchers and election integrity. “It’s my passion,” Gina Swoboda, the new Arizona state G.O.P. chair, told me. “You can’t fight if something starts to go wrong after you’ve started voting.”
In the 2020 election cycle, the R.N.C. spent a hundred and fifty million dollars on seventy-nine million attempted voter contacts in seven battleground states, but only managed to reach three million voters, according to the Wall Street Journal. Tyler Bowyer, now the C.O.O. of Turning Point Action, was then the co-chair of the R.N.C.’s grassroots committee. (He was also one of Arizona’s fake electors in Trump’s attempt to overturn the election.) In 2021, Bowyer helped to prepare a report on how to mobilize the grassroots, and presented it to Ronna McDaniel, who was running the R.N.C. before being ousted. “Ronna was, like, See you later, and that was basically it, she didn’t take it seriously,” one Turning Point Action official told me. (A longtime McDaniel aide disputed this account.) The official continued, “Then 2022 comes around, and all the voting machines went down here. Kari [Lake], who’s ahead in every poll, loses by seventeen-thousand ballots. So you’re, like, O.K., we’ve got to do something different here. And it was sort of, like, If they’re not going to do it, we’re going to do it. So we just started building it ourselves.”
Bowyer went on to develop the canvassing app that the Turning Point Action ballot-chasers use. The group is hoping that the app will be used nationally; in February, it assembled seventy-five of the G.O.P. chairs in some of the most electorally important counties across the country and gave them access to the software and the data. Matthew Martinez, who is helping to roll out the program, recalled that county chairs approached him and said, “No one’s ever broken down precinct by precinct, ward by ward, for my state . . . We know exactly where to chase now.” I was surprised that such data was so hard to come by. A senior Trump campaign official told me, “We went back and looked at all of the targeting that was used in 2020. It left a lot to be desired.” (By some accounts, they would accidentally turn out Democrats.) McKenna, the co-author of “Groundbreakers,” said, “It’s very hard to cut a list of turf for these low-propensity constituencies. And it’s not about having some special list—it’s about a community that’s engaged even after the national election, about building a locally embedded, long-term organization that is not surprised in the next cycle when it’s, like, there is this Somali apartment building complex outside the Twin Cities and you need to go there and talk to the Imam.” The question becomes, “can you build a civic infrastructure that outlasts the election, or is it an electoral sandcastle that falls away?”
Turning Point Action certainly aspires to outlast the election. Since 2020, it has reshaped the Arizona G.O.P by purging moderate members; Bowyer, for example, launched a campaign to remove the former speaker Rusty Bowers after he didn’t endorse the stolen-election theory. Some Turning Point Action staff not only join the G.O.P. but take on party roles. “There is no Republican Party in Arizona,” Chuck Coughlin, a longtime political consultant who worked for John McCain told me. “It’s been hijacked. Turning Point Action is the Republican Party for Arizona. It has been taken over from the inside out.” The state party apparatus, he went on, is “not designed to attract a new voter, a new Republican. It’s designed to attract a new MAGA voter. But how far can you press MAGA into a majority?” In the 2022 midterms, Turning Point Action’s PAC spent close to half a million dollars, and all of the group’s candidates in Arizona lost their general-election races. “They’re effective in working in that narrow alley of the Republican primary voter—defeating Republicans in primaries,” Coughlin said. “That base is not big enough to carry a state like Arizona. You have to win over some unaffiliated voters.”
At the Maricopa County Republican Committee headquarters, in Chandler, the front door bears an inscription: “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.” I was there for another Super Chase session. A volunteer named Madeline told me, “I’m worried there will be cheating. I hope we can flood the polls to overcome it.” Another volunteer, John Martinez, who wore a black Proud Boy wristband, an “I’m Voting for the Convicted Felon” hat, and a FAFO (fuck around and find out) T-shirt, was downloading the Turning Point Action app. Angel Guess, a field representative, was running the training. She brought her two small children to stand with her at the front of the room; a handful of other children were in the audience eating chips and drinking Powerade. “If we do not win, who knows what will happen to our country,” Guess said. “People have Trump signs in their yards, and a lot of them are not even registered to vote.”
Jeff Zink, a ballot chaser, precinct committee member, and Congressional candidate, told me, “We’re still proving the last election was stolen.” He had spent a lot of his time working to prove it. “But more people are saying, That was 2020, what do we do now?” Of the ballot-chasing program, he said, “It’s taking a page out of the Democratic playbook—they’re very good at rallying and getting people out. We don’t have Zuckerberg and Soros supporting us. This strategy here will actually turn the tide.” Guess handed out mini American flags that people could wave at the doorstep to convince homeowners to answer. “When you hear, ‘It’s rigged anyways,’ give them the ‘too big to rig’ spiel,” Zink reminded the group, referring to the strategy to flood the system with so many Trump votes that Democratic cheating attempts won’t work.
“They’re very discouraged,” Zink said to me, of the low-propensity voters who believe that the elections are rigged. “They’ve heard all this stuff about fraud.” (Kirk has spent years pushing this narrative.) Andrew Kolvet, the group’s spokesman, asked me if I was familiar with Pascal’s Wager. “It’s like, if you believe in God and he’s real, then you get to go to Heaven,” he said. “If you believe in God and he’s not real, all you did was you believed in God. If you don’t believe in God and he is real, then you get to go to Hell.” He went on, “So it’s kind of the same thing with voting. It’s like if your vote’s going to count and you vote, then, hey, we all won. If you’re going to vote and it’s not going to count, then what have you done? You were inconvenienced to fill out a piece of paper.”
Following the session, I went out canvassing with Chacón, the field representative I had first met in Scottsdale, and a volunteer named Rich, a ballot chaser who works part time in sales. “I listen to conservative podcasts and I have a head full of knowledge,” he told me. “And I was a Jehovah’s Witness, so doing door-knocking and following up has been part of the deal for me.” We drove into Chandler Crossing, the nearest subdivision, at dusk. The first house we walked up to had stickers in the window for the N.R.A., the U.S. Navy, and Blue Lives Matter. “We can be explicitly conservative with this guy,” Chacón said. Rich knocked and we lingered in the threshold for a minute. “I really want to talk to him,” Rich said. They stood another minute, then walked back out onto the street and took pictures of the sunset. Rich and I went up to a door with a sign that said “Do not knock or ring bell . . . shit will get real.” We turned around. The next subdivision on the map turned out to be a gated community that we couldn’t get into. The app pointed us to another grouping of houses, where, eventually, a man named Nicholas opened a door wearing plaid pajama pants.
“We’re actually encouraging early voting this year,” Rich said.
“Mind me asking why?” Nicholas said. “Because I would normally go on Election Day.”
“Believe me, so did I,” Rich said. “But what happened in the last election?”
“You got me,” Nicholas said.
“And our opponents knew that and they got us, so we’re trying to bank votes now ahead of time, and we’re encouraging early voting.”
Chacón jumped in: “If you have a flat tire, or something, we want to make sure you still get out to vote, right? Just got to make sure we send Trump back to the White House. We can’t afford to lose this time. We’ve seen it happen in other states.” Nicholas agreed to take it under advisement. It got dark and the lawn sprinklers started going on. We approached our final house. “I think I voted last fall,” the Republican at the door said. Maybe he meant 2022? “No, maybe it was 2020. I can’t remember who. I can’t remember what that election was for.” ♦
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Publish date : 2024-09-09 12:40:00
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