Mercenary Door Knockers

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses party organizations and campaign finance.  Trump is outsourcing his ground game.

Don the Con is getting conned.

Hugo Lowell at The Guardian:

Donald Trump’s campaign may be failing to reach thousands of voters they hope to turn out in Arizona and Nevada, with roughly a quarter of door-knocks done by America Pac flagged by its canvassing app as potentially fraudulent, according to leaked data and people familiar with the matter.

The potentially fake door-knocks – when canvassers falsely claim they visited a home – could present a serious setback to Trump as he and Kamala Harris remain even in the polls with fewer than 20 days to an election that increasingly appears set to be determined by turnout.

The Trump campaign earlier this year outsourced the bulk of its ground game to America Pac, the political action committee founded by Musk, betting that spending millions to turn out Trump supporters, especially those who don’t typically vote, would boost returns.

But leaked America Pac data obtained by the Guardian shows that roughly 24% of the door-knocks in Arizona and 25% of the door-knocks in Nevada this week were flagged under “unusual survey logs” by the Campaign Sidekick canvassing app.

The Arizona data, for example, shows that out of 35,692 doors hit by 442 canvassers working for Blitz Canvassing in the America Pac operation on Wednesday, 8,511 doors were flagged under the unusual survey logs.

The extent of the flagged doors in America Pac’s operation underscores the risk of outsourcing a ground-game program, where paid canvassers are typically not as invested in their candidate’s victory compared to volunteers or campaign staff​.

 Former Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-VA):

Mercenary door knockers - never goes well. High cost, low return. Don’t believe in your candidate or cause. Consultants get $$$ and donors get had. https://t.co/UKCm5KLGyw

— Barbara Comstock (@BarbaraComstock) October 19, 2024

Harris and Trump GOTV

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses party organizations and campaign finance.  Trump is outsourcing his ground game.

Lisa Lerer, Julie Bosman, Kellen Browning, Maya King and Jonathan Weisman at NYT:

In the final weeks of the 2024 election, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. 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.

Ms. Harris’s 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. Mr. 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, Pa., Kenosha County, Wis., Maricopa County, Ariz., and Cobb County, Ga. — 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.

“The national discourse kind of falls on deaf ears if it doesn’t feel real and localized,” said Dan Kanninen, the Harris campaign’s battleground states director. “Ultimately you’re trying to have a cohesive conversation with a voter across many modes to connect the dots.”

All told, the number of voters deciding the 2024 election could most likely fit in, and perhaps not even fill, a college football stadium. Across the seven battleground states, where the contests are in a dead heat, every ballot counts.

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 three million calls through 63,000 volunteer shifts.

Mr. 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 Mr. 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.

Trump GOTV

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses party organizations and campaign finance.  Trump is outsourcing his ground game.

Steve Contorno and Fredreka Schouten, CNN:

Targeting irregular voters, teaching supporters to surveil polling places and bombarding states with voting-related lawsuits – this is the machine the Trump campaign has built for an election that many expect to hinge on just tens of thousands of ballots cast across seven battleground states. It’s a gamble, Trump’s campaign internally acknowledges, but one that they insist is built on data they have collected over nearly a decade and tested for the past six months.

That, and tens of millions of dollars injected lately by a super PAC aligned with tech billionaire Elon Musk, one of Trump’s most vocal and influential supporters.

The campaign’s untraditional strategy was on display when conservative commentator Tucker Carlson came to Grand Rapids last month. He urged his audience to download an app – 10xVotes – that promises to help them find the non-voting conservatives among their family and friends. Days later, the Michigan state party chairman also plugged 10xVotes when he rolled into Traverse City, Michigan, alongside Trump running mate JD Vance.

Elsewhere in the state, the Trump campaign is holding “election integrity” training, teaching conservatives to be poll watchers, including in areas where Republicans normally win by wide margins. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign and Republican Party are suing the state of Michigan to keep local Veteran Affairs offices and other federal outposts from offering voter registration.

The approach marks a stark contrast to how Trump won the Grand Rapids metro area and other battlegrounds eight years ago, when voter outreach efforts were coordinated by the Republican Party and organized out of regional field offices. And it’s one that has attracted plenty of detractors among GOP strategists, who say they see little evidence of the sophisticated political apparatus the Trump campaign claims is in motion. They worry too much emphasis has been placed on people who are disengaged from politics and on appeasing Trump’s fixation with relitigating the 2020 election.

“It’s political malpractice,” said Dennis Lennox, a veteran Republican operative in Michigan. “It’s a Hail Mary.”

 

Ground Game

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses party organizations and campaign finance.  Trump is outsourcing his ground game.

Sophia Cai and Torey Van Oot at Axios:

Donald Trump's campaign, lacking the on-the-ground muscle to match Kamala Harris' team, has been rolling out a strategy to target swing-state voters who've shown interest in Trump but often don't vote.

Why it matters: Trump campaign training materials obtained by Axios offer an inside look into the strategy the ex-president's team is betting on to turn out voters in Pennsylvania and at least six other key states.

The big picture: The materials describe the 2020 Trump campaign's reach-out efforts as "inefficient," and emphasize the campaign's priorities of reaching more "quality" contacts in its race to the Nov. 5 election.Trump's team is outgunned in sheer resources: The campaign says it has about 27,000 volunteers on the ground overall, while Harris' campaign claims to have 60,000 in Pennsylvania alone.

As Axios has reported, Trump's campaign has focused more on developing an "election integrity" team of 175,000 poll workers and poll watchers nationwide, a program rooted in the ex-president's false claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election was fraudulent.

Shelby Talcott at Semafor:

Turning Point Action, one of the more high profile groups involved in helping turn out the vote, has touted its efforts in the field and expressed pride in their initiatives. Founded by Charlie Kirk, it’s the political advocacy arm of Turning Point USA, a group that’s been controversial within some party circles for its flamboyant culture-war emphasis. One veteran GOP strategist described the group to Semafor as “a total grifting operation,” and others have had questions about standard metrics like the number of doors knocked and wondered how much work the group is actually doing.

One official with Turning Point Action emphasized they were not intended to lead the party’s overall efforts, but had a specific role which they said is “narrowly focused on low-propensity, disengaged Republican voters — a universe that comprises 300,000+ in Arizona and 300,000+ in Wisconsin, and then 40,000 in Michigan 7[th district] and 30,000 in Nevada’s 3rd.” According to an internal memo reported on in April, the group had a lofty goal of raising and spending over $108 million on a Chase the Vote program: They have not reached that aspirational number, Semafor was told, and can’t use funding from Turning Point USA, which is a 501(c)(3).

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

Hugo Lowell at The Guardian:

But the Pacs, which are supposed to bridging the gap, have been slow to spool up, according to people with direct access to the data for groups like America Pac, Turnout for America, Turning Point Action and America First Works.

They have only started to hire at a rapid clip in recent weeks, the people said, meaning they are reaching Trump supporters late in the cycle when it often takes repeated “voter contacts” to get them to return a ballot.

 

 

Trump v. Trump

Our books have discussed Trump's low character, which was on display this month At times, his crudeness has helped him appear transgressive.  Lately, it has hurt him

Trump is undercutting his own campaign messages. Sophia Cai at Axios:

Zoom in: This week, his campaign debuted a Pennsylvania mail-in voting website for a program called "Swamp the Vote," aimed at boosting GOP turnout in swing states.The same day, Trump called mail-in voting "terrible" during an interview with "Dr. Phil" McGraw.

"We want to get rid of mail-in voting," Trump said at a rally in Pennsylvania on Friday, adding to the mixed messages coming from his campaign. Some Republicans, egged on by Trump, have associated mail-in voting with voter fraud — despite a lack of evidence.

For months, Trump's team has been training field volunteers to get out the Republican vote.But Trump is making clear he doesn't care as much about their efforts as he does "election integrity" — a push aimed in part at justifying his false claims that he lost the 2020 election only because of fraud. "Our primary focus is not to get out the vote — but to make sure they don't cheat," Trump said last week.
...

The ex-president continues to lean into personal attacks, despite his advisers' repeated efforts to get him to focus more on issues.They're writing policy proposals into his speeches, and pushing policy ideas on social media and in a daily campaign newsletter, Palm Beach Playbook.

Trump frequently deviates from prepared remarks to ask those at his rallies which nicknames he should give his opponents. Mispronouncing Harris' first name is a constant feature of his rallies. He's begun calling her "Comrade Kamala."

In North Carolina during the Democratic convention, Trump complained: "They always say, 'Sir, please stick to policy, don't get personal ... You'll win it on the border. You'll win it with inflation. You'll win it with your great military that you built.'"

He then did a "free poll" of the crowd: "Should I get personal, or should I not get personal?" The MAGA crowd roared, wanting more vintage Trump.

"My advisers are fired!" he joked at a time when he's brought back past advisers such as Corey Lewandowski.

Outsourcing the Ground Game

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses party organizations and campaign finance.

Sophia Cai at Axios:

Donald Trump's obsession with "election integrity" has led his team to build a network of more than 150,000 poll watchers and poll workers, while relying mostly on outside groups to connect with voters on the ground.

Why it matters: Some Republicans worry that Trump's focus on preventing a "rigged" election has hurt the party's ground game, the get-out-the-vote operations that can be crucial in an election as close as this one.Trump's "election integrity" team also has raised concerns among Democrats about potential voter intimidation at the polls. If Trump loses on Nov. 5, the election teams would be his evidence collectors for what almost certainly would be a barrage of legal challenges — and calls for state officials not to certify the election results.

Theodore Schleifer at NYT:

The Republican campaign for president is quietly being remade by new federal guidelines that empower big-money groups and threaten to undermine party control well beyond the 2024 election.

Former President Donald J. Trump’s team has enlisted some of these groups to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to knock on hundreds of thousands of doors across the country — saving the campaign significant money in the process.

But the Trump campaign is making a serious gamble in doing so, betting that these outside groups, which they do not directly control, can carry out their marching orders without accountability.

This transformation is a consequence of a surprise decision by the Federal Election Commission earlier this year that allows campaigns to coordinate their canvassing efforts with outside groups like super PACs. The change means that campaigns can outsource much of their costly ground game to entities that can take unlimited donations and raise money at a much faster clip.

Democrats Abroad

Our most recent book is Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Less than 48 hours after Biden's withdrawal, Kamala Harris became the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee.  And in just a few weeks, the race has changed. 

Andrea Shalal at Reuters:

The Democratic National Committee will spend $300,000 in a first-ever push to register the 9 million Americans living abroad, working to win votes for the party's candidate Vice President Kamala Harris in the Nov. 5 presidential election.

The funding for Democrats Abroad, which represents Democrats living outside the United States, will be used to pay for voter registration drives and spread information about how to vote from overseas, a DNC official said on Monday.


The official said it was the DNC's first time funding Democrats Abroad and the efforts would be focused on Mexico and Europe, where the largest number of overseas Americans live.

DNC officials said there were over 1.6 million Americans from the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin living overseas, and it would fight for every vote 

Those states are essential for Harris or Republican former President Donald Trump to win the election. When President Joe Biden beat Trump to win the 2020 presidency he did so by a margin of just 44,000 votes across Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin.

Native Americans in Montana

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.

Natalie Fertig at Politico:

Native Americans are always an important voting bloc in Montana, where they make up 6.5 percent of the population, per U.S. Census data. But this November, their involvement could potentially impact the entire nation.

Control of the Senate may hang on the outcome of the Montana Senate race, where Democratic Sen. Jon Tester is up for reelection in this reliably red state, likely facing off against Republican Tim Sheehy, whom former President Donald Trump has endorsed. Trump won Montana by nearly 17 percentage points in 2020, and Tester won by 3.5 percentage points — or nearly 18,000 votes — in 2018. Montana’s tribes comprise about five percent of the voting bloc, nearly twice the margin by which Tester won his last race.

Native voters are “hugely important to the Democratic base,” says Jim Messina, an Obama White House alum and former adviser to Tester with deep political roots in Montana. Tester ousted Republican Sen. Conrad Burns in 2006 in part by siphoning off some of Burns’ support among Native Americans. “Tester was able to cut into that bloc and really move them towards him,” Messina says.

But turnout could be a problem.

To rectify this, Montana Democrats are rolling out their largest-ever Native voting initiative, planning to invest more than $1 million over the next six months. That’s nearly double the $600,000 they had to target Native voters during the 2018 campaign. (The Montana GOP did not respond to multiple requests for an interview about their efforts to woo tribal voters.)

As a longtime advocate of Native Americans in politics, Blackfeet tribal member Michael DesRosier is a true believer in the power of the indigenous vote.“We have the numbers,” the former Glacier County commissioner says as he sits in the county office, one brown cowboy boot-clad foot propped up on the other knee. “That’s the quandary here: getting them out to vote.”

Ground Game, Rural Vote

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses party organizations and campaign finance.

Hans Nichols and Alex Thompson at Axios:

President Biden's campaign is investing in dozens of field offices in some of the nation's reddest counties, pressing its early money advantage to establish political beachheads in hostile territory.

Why it matters: Biden's team isn't under the illusion it can win these rural counties Donald Trump won in 2020. It's fighting to cut into Republicans' margins — particularly in swing states such as Wisconsin. The goal is to establish a ground presence early in the election cycle and keep rural Biden supporters motivated — while letting voters dismayed by Trump or curious about Biden know they're not be alone.

Zoom in: Biden's campaign has opened more than 150 offices and hired more than 400 staffers in the seven battleground states and will have 200 offices and 500 staffers there by the end of May, the campaign says.In Wisconsin, Biden now has 46 offices across 42 counties, including 23 where Trump won by double digits in 2020.

Biden's strategy still calls for a heavy presence in Wisconsin's Democrat-heavy population centers, with three field offices in Milwaukee County, the most populous in the state.

But the president's team also has offices in places like Rusk County, home to about 14,000 people. Trump trounced Biden by 35% there four years ago, receiving 2,740 more votes.

That's the kind of rural-county margin Biden is hoping to reduce at a time when polls have suggested that voter enthusiasm within Biden's base isn't as energized as it was in 2020, when he won Wisconsin by about 20,000 votes.

What they're saying: "The name of the game is to lose by less" in red counties, Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler told Axios."You lose a place by 25 instead of by 35, that can be really vital" in a close battle to win the overall vote in a state, said Dan Kanninen, the Biden campaign's battleground states director.

 Michael Scherer, Josh Dawsey, Maeve Reston and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez at WP:

Trump’s 2024 campaign has traded Star Wars metaphors for talk of a “leaner” and “more efficient” operation, with less real estate, fewer employees and greater dependence on outside groups.

“We’re focused on quality over quantity. I mean, how novel a concept,” top strategist Chris LaCivita told the crowd of top donors May 4 at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., according to attendees.
 
The shift comes as President Biden’s campaign and its allies, buoyed by incumbency, have been moving in the opposite direction, building a more expansive operation sooner than in 2020. Strategists for both major parties expect Democrats to raise and spend more than Republicans over the coming months, a dynamic that has been magnified by the significant legal costs Trump’s fundraising apparatus has absorbed to defend him in state and federal courts.

 

"It means they don't have the campaign cash to spend."@DelPercioS and @DonnaFEdwards join @KatiePhang to talk about the reported GOP concerns about a "leaner" Trump campaign operation. pic.twitter.com/WVfr04IlcH

— 11th Hour (@11thHour) May 11, 2024

Super PACs, Door Knocking, and Coordination

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses party organizations and campaign finance.

David Drucker at The Dispatch:

The Federal Election Commission, in a little-noticed decision that could radically reshape campaign politics, is giving candidates the greenlight to coordinate with super PACs and other outside groups on door-to-door voter turnout activities.

Under the Texas Majority PAC advisory opinion the FEC issued on March 20, candidates for Congress and the White House are permitted to work directly with allied groups on the expensive, labor-intensive work of door-to-door voter canvassing. That includes giving strategic direction to supportive super PACs and other politically active organizations, as well as sharing preferred messaging. Additionally, the FEC’s advisory opinion also permits candidates to access the voter data collected from an allied group’s door-knocking—as long as their campaigns pay for it.

Political operatives on both sides of the aisle describe this development as consequential, saying it could change how candidates—especially presidential candidates—manage field operations. Some Republican insiders worry Democrats will gain yet another fundraising and infrastructure edge heading into November. “We’re concerned that it gives the Democrats an advantage because their outside groups are better funded and their people are easier to canvas,” a GOP election lawyer said, requesting anonymity to speak candidly.

Meanwhile, there are a few legal caveats.

The FEC’s Texas Majority PAC advisory opinion does not apply to phone banking, text messaging, or direct mail, crucial components of any get-out-the-vote effort. In other words, campaigns must still honor the ban on coordinating with outside groups vis-a-vis those activities. Additionally, election lawyers believe groups that coordinate door-to-door canvassing with candidates are going to have to “firewall” that effort from the rest of the organization, to ensure communications with the campaign, and the data gathered, are not used in advertising or messaging.

Until the FEC rendered this interpretation of campaign finance law, candidates were prohibited from communicating with outside groups—no exceptions.

So, even though super PACs can raise unlimited cash versus strict donor limits placed on campaigns, the inability to coordinate strategy and messaging—and to share in the trove of data—made relying on such groups for voter turnout risky. Further, it was usually ineffective. Exhibit A: Ron DeSantis and his 2024 president bid. The Florida governor delegated his ground game to a super PAC, Never Back Down. The effort devolved into infighting and produced a 30-point loss for DeSantis in Iowa’s caucuses.

With the barrier to coordinating on door-to-door canvassing lifted, farming out this key aspect of voter turnout to cash-flush super PACs and other resource-rich outside groups becomes eminently more feasible, strategically, since some of the problems that plagued DeSantis are less likely to emerge. Indeed, knowledgeable Republican sources tell Dispatch Politics that former President Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee, and the Republican National Committee, are planning to cede door-knocking efforts to various outside groups.

GOP Ground Game Grifting

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. 

Allan Smith at NBC:

The large-scale voter contact effort that conservatives have put at the center of their political operations in recent years is plagued with issues, according to more than a dozen people who’ve worked in GOP-aligned field operations and internal data obtained by NBC News. Those issues include fraudulent and untrustworthy data entries, akin to what occurred in Nevada, as well as allegations of lax hiring practices and a lack of accountability. 

...

Though Democrats deal with some of the same door-knocking challenges, the party has built-in advantages for in-person canvassing, according to interviews with two Democratic canvassing veterans as well as with Republicans with similar experience. They include a more ready supply of younger volunteers, allies in organized labor offering union workers to hit the doors and a base of supporters who are more tightly concentrated in urban and dense suburban areas where canvassers can hit a lot more doors in a lot less time.

... 

Canvassers once went around with clipboards and paper, checking off houses along the way. Now, canvassers are largely expected to tick off doors in real time via smartphone apps equipped with geotracking, a core fraud-prevention capability. Canvassing experts say there are some valid reasons to still use paper on a small scale, but those types of entries make it more difficult to ensure that a canvasser was physically knocking on a door.

A high volume of paper, these experts said, would be cause for concern — as appears to be the case last year in Georgia’s general election.

Two field staffers who worked for Georgia Victory, a ground-game operation jointly overseen by the RNC and the state Republican Party, said that as November neared, they became increasingly alarmed by the unusually high volume of paper entries. The operation used the app Campaign Sidekick, a Republican-aligned data platform that includes geotracking technology.

...

In recent cycles, Republicans have become more and more dependent on paid canvassing facilitated by outside consultants. While a welcome resource, paid door-knockers, who are often flown in from out of state, are sometimes minimally vetted in order to be deployed quickly, multiple sources said. Consulting outfits may take on jobs only to subcontract them out to other firms, creating an unwieldy patchwork that’s difficult to police. Eight sources said this system may make the data that campaigns are getting about potential voters less reliable.

Consultants and the GOP

 Our recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. 

Erick Erickson:

A number of years ago, I noted a connection between various Republican consultants and the incestuous ties within political campaigns. The GOP has a problem with a lot of consultants. They get paid commissions whether a candidate wins or loses. They get commissions from most parts of a campaign business and, interestingly, do not invest in parts that do not pay commissions. It is time for action.

On the consultant front, here in Georgia, it is not just that Raphael Warnock outspent Herschel Walker. It is how Warnock outspent Walker. In 2021, Warnock had over seventy varieties of streaming ads for digital services. The Republicans had two. This time, again, Warnock more precisely targeted various voters online than the GOP did. One will not be surprised to discover how little consultants make off digital advertising.

In 2008 and 2012, Barack Obama brought his consulting team in house, paid them salaries, and gave them benefits. The GOP continued to rely on outside consultants who drew commissions and often worked multiple candidates. Obama hired some of the best and had them totally committed to him. The GOP hired the freelancers who freelanced and made commissions. Obama got better deals because his consultants were in house, not marking up their work for commissions.

There really are no commissions for early voting ground games. The GOP consultants have focused on media ad buys, mail pieces, and not critical operations for vote mobilization. That must change for the GOP to win. Either the consultants need to rethink or the GOP needs better consultants.

Registration Drives in the Midterm

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses congressional and state elections.  The 2021 off-year races were a curtain-raiser for the midterms -- and the stage was full of bad mojo for Democrats.

Blake Hounshell and Leah Askarinam report on Democratic midterm strategy:

The latest entry into the debate comes from Forward Majority, a Democratic-aligned super PAC focused on winning the sorts of state legislative races that are increasingly central in American politics.

In a provocative new “Blueprint for Power,” the group calls for a “radical departure” from the Democratic Party’s existing strategy, which has left Republicans in command of key state legislatures across the country.

“We need to claw our way back to power to prevent election subversion,” Vicky Hausman, founder and co-chief executive of Forward Majority, said in an interview, expressing a common fear on the left that in 2024 Republicans will use those statehouse majorities to steal the next presidential election. Forward Majority has identified nearly 2 million unregistered voters it sees as likely Democratic, largely in suburban areas that the group says are critical to winning those legislatures back.

The new data comes as Republicans have begun to outpace Democrats in voter registration in major swing states, including Florida, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. Worse for Democrats, the coronavirus pandemic disrupted the usual pathways that the party had used to bring in new voters: sign-ups at the Department of Motor Vehicles and face-to-face field work. And it comes as President Biden faces growing skepticism among African Americans over whether he has a formula to overcome voting restrictions pushed by G.O.P.-led state legislatures — the topic of a high-profile address that he plans to give on Tuesday in Atlanta.

An analysis by Catalist, a Democratic data firm, shows that in 2020, the Democrats’ traditional edge in voter registration shrank to nine percentage points in key states, down from a 19-percentage-point advantage over Republicans in 2009.

Democratic Postmortem

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses issues, organization, and voter demographics.

Alexander Burns at NYT:

Democrats defeated President Donald J. Trump and captured the Senate last year with a racially diverse coalition that delivered victories by tiny margins in key states like Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin.

In the next election, they cannot count on repeating that feat, a new report warns.

A review of the 2020 election, conducted by several prominent Democratic advocacy groups, has concluded that the party is at risk of losing ground with Black, Hispanic and Asian American voters unless it does a better job presenting an economic agenda and countering Republican efforts to spread misinformation and tie all Democratic candidates to the far left.

The 70-page report, obtained by The New York Times, was assembled at the behest of three major Democratic interest groups: Third Way, a centrist think tank, and the Collective PAC and the Latino Victory Fund, which promote Black and Hispanic candidates. It appears to be the most thorough act of self-criticism carried out by Democrats or Republicans after the last campaign.

The document is all the more striking because it is addressed to a victorious party: Despite their successes, Democrats had hoped to achieve more robust control of both chambers of Congress, rather than the ultra-precarious margins they enjoy.

From the report:

1. Voters of color are persuasion voters who need to be convinced
2.  Republican attempts to brand Democrats as " radicals worked
3. Polling was a huge problem - even after 2016 adjustments
4.  COVID-19 affected everything
5. Year-round organizing worked, as did cross- Party collaboration
6. Our hopes for 2020 were just too high

Labor Day Post: Union Density, Right to Work, and Elections

In Defying the Odds, we suggest an under-examined reason why Democrats were unexpectedly weak in key industrial states;  union membership was way down.

At the high point of their influence many years ago, they [labor unions] supplied the people who worked the phones, stuffed the envelopes and walked the precincts on behalf of the Democrats.  In some states, they still were a significant force, but overall, they were on the wane. Between 1983 and 2015, union membership as a share of employed workers plunged by almost half, from 20.1 percent to 11.1 percent.   Not coincidentally, the drop-off was steepest in five industrial states that voted Republican in the 2016 presidential race 

 Percentage Change in Union Density, Selected States, 1983-2015

                                    1983                2015                Change

Wisconsin                    24.2                 08.4                -15.8

Michigan                     30.8                 15.3                 -15.5

Indiana                        25.2                 10.1                 -15.1

Pennsylvania               27.7                 13.4                 -14.3

Ohio                             25.3                 12.4                 -12.9

Source: Barry T. Hirsch and David A. Macpherson, “State Union Membership Density 1964-2015,” http://unionstats.gsu.edu/State_Union_Membership_Density_1964-2015.xlsx; Barry T. Hirsch, David A. Macpherson, and Wayne G. Vroman, “Estimates of Union Density by State,” Monthly Labor Review 124, No. 7, July 2001, http://unionstats.gsu.edu/MLR_7-01_StateUnionDensity.pdf

A 2018 APSA paper looks at a related topic and its findings seem consistent with our observation. See "Demobilizing Democrats and Labor Unions: Political Effects of Right to Work Laws," by James Feigenbaum, Alexander Warren Hertel-Fernandez, and Vanessa Williamson.  The abstract:

Labor unions play a central role in the Democratic party coalition, providing candidates with voters, volunteers, and contributions and lobbying government. Has the recent decline of organized labor hurt Democrats? We use the enactment of right-to-work laws—which weaken unions by removing agency shop protections—to estimate the effect of unions on politics from 1980 to 2016. Comparing counties on either side of a state and right-to-work border to causally identify the effects of the state laws, we find right-to-work laws reduce Democratic presidential vote shares by 4 to 6 percentage points. We find similar effects in US Senate, US House, and gubernatorial races, as well as state legislative control. Turnout is also 2 to 3 percentage points lower in right-to-work counties after those laws pass. We next explore mechanisms behind these effects, finding that right-to-work laws dampen organized labor campaign contributions to Democrats and that likely Democratic voters are less likely to be contacted to vote in right-to-work states. The weakening of unions also has large downstream effects both on who runs for office and state legislative policy. Fewer working class candidates serve in state legislatures and Congress and state policy moves in a more conservative direction following the passage of right-to-work laws.

They identify a key mechanism by which such laws affect turnout.

We find that RTW laws are associated with a reduction in the probability that non-professional workers—but not professional workers—report get-out-the-vote contact during the campaign. Table 4 presents the results of this analysis, with a binary indicator for GOTV contact during the last campaign as the outcome. In the model with individual controls, we find that RTW laws reduce the probability that a non-professional worker reported GOTV contact by 11 percentage points but had no discernible effect on professional and managerial workers

They mention something that we discuss in the book, namely that deliberate political strategy is at work.

Aside from the theoretical contributions of the paper, our results also have bearing on current debates in U.S. politics. The anti-tax political activist Grover Norquist recently declared that while President Donald J. Trump may be historically unpopular, the GOP could still “win big” in 2020.41 The secret to the Republican party’s long-term success, Norquist argued, involved state level initiatives to weaken the power of labor unions. As Norquist explained it, if union reforms cutting the power of labor unions to recruit and retain members—like RTW laws—“are enacted in a dozen more states, the modern Democratic Party will cease to be a competitive power in American politics.” A weaker labor movement, Norquist reasoned, would not just have economic consequences. It would also have significant political repercussions, meaning that Democrats would
have substantially less of a grassroots presence on the ground during elections and less money to invest in politics

Fearless Forecast

Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

Popular vote:Clinton 49 Trump 44 Johnson 4 Stein 2 Other 1

House: net GOP loss of 19 seats, including 4 in California (Issa, Denham, Valadao, Knight) 

Senate: Dems win North Carolina, Missouri, Illinois, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, for a 51-49 majority.

My D numbers are a bit higher than consensus, for two reasons.

1.  Demographics.  I think the likely-voter screens are missing some Latino low-propensity voters who will  turn out for Clinton.  RCP average has Trump ahead in Nevada, even though Clinton has already locked up the state thanks to Hispanic early voters.  I suspect that the same dynamic will tip Florida.  In North Carolina, black early vote was down, in part because there weren't enough early-voting sites.  Dems will make up some of that deficit today.  Also, the D advantage among college-educated whites will make a difference in NC, too.

2.  Mobilization.  Democrats have an even greater advantage in GOTV than they did 4 years ago, which is saying a lot.

The story of key Senate races is a revolt against insiders. That's why Blunt and Burr are in trouble, and why Bayh will probably fail.

Note Alaska.  My Hail Mary longshot prediction is that Clinton wins. Not as crazy as it sounds:  she has actually led some polls there.  Reason:  Trump's issues do not resonate with Alaska whites, but they have alienated Native Alaskans.

The Clinton Ground Advantage, in Numbers

In 2012, Obama had a major ground advantage over Romney.  Reid Wilson and Joe DiSipio report at The Hill:

In critical swing states where Trump and Clinton are competing for electoral votes, the disparity is stark. The Ohio Democratic Party has 502 staffers on payroll. The state Republican Party paid just 104 people in its last payroll period.

More than 300 staffers were on the North Carolina Democratic Party’s payroll at the end of September. That’s three times the number of state Republican Party staffers on the ground.

In Nevada, where polls show a tight race, the state Republican Party employs 67 staffers. The state Democratic Party has several times that number, 240. Iowa Republicans, who hope to preserve Trump’s relatively strong poll numbers, have 32 staffers. The state Democratic Party has 206 paid staff.

In Pennsylvania, a must-win state for Trump’s campaign, state Republicans employ 62 total staff — and state Democrats have 508 people on payroll. Florida Democrats have 678 paid staffers, compared with 150 people who work for the Republican Party of Florida.

Polls also show Arizona, normally a reliably red state, is a closer contest than anticipated. The Clinton campaign said this week it would invest $2 million trying to win Arizona’s 10 electoral votes — and the state party reported paying 230 field staffers last month. By contrast, the Arizona Republican Party paid just 12 staff members.

Among the battleground states on the map this year, Republicans maintain a staffing edge in just one state: New Hampshire, where the state GOP pays 222 people. Democrats have a staff about half that size.

But about three quarters of the paid GOP staff received small stipends, an indication they are among the ranks of trained organizers rather than full-time staff.

State party payrolls only hint at the paid staff advantage Democrats have as Election Day looms and early voting begins. The Clinton campaign reported paying 809 staffers in September, while the Trump campaign paid just 152. The DNC has 478 staffers, according to their FEC reports; the RNC has just 270.

Digital Clinton v. Analog Trump

Sasha Issenberg reports at Bloomberg:

Both of President Barack Obama’s campaigns were organized around a series of six regional pods, with a lead official in each responsible for managing field, data, communication, or digital across seven or eight states.

2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton also uses pods—but hers look nothing like Obama’s. As she has reoriented her campaign for the general election, her team has devised a structure that reflects not geographic contiguity, with its common weather patterns or vernacular music traditions across neighboring states, but instead the different type of campaigning she will need to win each one. Most importantly, the structure acknowledges the increasing importance of early voting, which offers Clinton the potential to lock in an early lead when ballots begin to be cast in late September.

...
In Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters, states with major opportunities for early voting—such as North Carolina and Colorado—are in their own pod, while the remaining states are divided into two. One pod has large, diverse states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, where mobilizing minorities and young whites will be essential to her victory. The other pod contains smaller, mostly white ones like Iowa and New Hampshire, which present fewer opportunities to identify and turn out new voters but a major need for persuasion.

Jim Tankersley reports at the Washington Post: \

Hillary Clinton is running arguably the most digital presidential campaign in U.S. history. Donald Trump is running one of the most analog campaigns in recent memory. The Clinton team is bent on finding more effective ways to identify supporters and ensure they cast ballots; Trump is, famously and unapologetically, sticking to an 1980s-era focus on courting attention and voters via television.

He interviews Issenberg:

Trump is very much a throwback to that old mass-media world — this is a guy who seems to prize being on the cover of Time or featured in "60 Minutes" above anything else — but has also decided to run for president on the cheap. So he's still relying on the three national networks (and cable news), but since he isn't paying for airtime, he is reliant on the media to filter his message in a way that past candidates haven't been. No wonder he's in such a love-hate relationship with us.

...
Now I think that dramatically fails to appreciate the extent to which campaigns are not just about changing people's opinions to get them to like you. Now more than ever, thanks to partisan polarization, campaigns are about modifying the behavior of people who already like you — getting the unregistered to register, mobilizing infrequent voters to turn out. That is best done through targeted communications that don't involve the candidate

We know from dozens if not hundreds of randomized field experiments that the best way to turn a non-voter into a voter is to have a well-trained volunteer from his or her neighborhood conduct a high-quality face-to-face interaction at the doorstep. The Clinton campaign is building the structure to do a lot of that, at scale, before voters they have modeled as most likely to change their behavior as a result. That doesn't fit into Trump's idea of what an election is about. To his credit, though, unlike a lot of candidates, he doesn't go through the motions of halfheartedly opening field offices — or printing up yard signs to fill them with — without understanding how they fit into his broader strategy.

Trump's Unusual Campaign

Maggie Haberman and Nick Corasaniti report at The New York Times:

David Carney, a veteran Republican strategist here, has received six phone calls at his Hancock, N.H., home from Donald J. Trump’s campaign the last few days. But five came after the Trump volunteers were told that the occupants were backing another candidate: Mr. Carney’s wife is Carly Fiorina’s campaign director in the state.

For Mr. Carney, who has often praised Mr. Trump’s message, the wayward calls signaled impressive grass-roots enthusiasm. But they were also a telltale sign of strategic rudderlessness.

“They have a lot of volunteers and they’re proud about that, but volunteers is not a ground game,” said Mr. Carney, who was the top strategist for Rick Perry’s 2012 presidential race and has been deeply involved in studies of how campaigns use information about voters. “They’re basically just picking up the phone book.”

 CNN reports:

On the cusp of the New Hampshire primary, there are growing questions about GOP front-runner Donald Trump's ground game in the state even as he maintains a double-digit lead against rivals.

An email sent out to supporters on January 30th called on them to "Talk for Trump Today!" and listed call centers across the state in four field offices, and four public meeting spaces.

At one hotel -- listed as a call center -- a receptionist told CNN one Trump staffer and about three volunteers showed up throughout the day. At two of the restaurants listed, employees told CNN they weren't aware of any campaign activities that day.

In the months leading up to the primary, Trump has eschewed conventional wisdom that has had other candidates camped out in New Hampshire for months. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Ohio Gov. John Kasich are staking their campaigns on success in the state, and Trump has held around one-quarter of the events as each of them.

 Nicholas Confessore and Sarah Cohen report at The New York Times:

Donald J. Trump once boasted that he could someday be the only person to turn a profit running for president. He may be closer than anyone realizes.

Mr. Trump’s campaign spent just $12.4 million in 2015, according to disclosures filed with the Federal Election Commission, millions less than any of his leading rivals for the Republican nomination. More than half of Mr. Trump’s total spending was covered by checks from his supporters, who have thronged to his stump speeches and bought millions of dollars’ worth of “Make America Great Again” hats and T-shirts.

About $2.7 million more was paid to at least seven companies Mr. Trump owns or to people who work for his real estate and branding empire, repaying them for services provided to his campaign. That total included more than $2 million for flights on his own planes and helicopter, a quarter of a million dollars to his Fifth Avenue office tower, and even $66,000 to Keith Schiller, his bodyguard and the head of security at the Trump Organization.

Cruz Mailer Backfires

Green and Gerber experimented with "social pressure" mailers to increase turnout. David Weigel reports at The Washington Post:

In his best-selling book "The Victory Lab," reporter Sasha Issenberg pointed to the "social pressure" experiment as a daring, clever way to bring out a political base. In 2012, MoveOn used pressure-style mailers to turn out progressive votes for President Obama.

Yet today, a similar letter from Sen. Ted Cruz's (R-Tex.) to Iowa Republicans is becoming a mini-scandal. On Saturday morning, Republican strategist and writer Sarah Rumpf found a tweet (now deleted) from Iowa voter Tom Hinkelday, displaying a Cruz mailer meant to look like a "VOTER VIOLATION."

"CAUCUS ON MONDAY TO IMPROVE YOUR SCORE," read the mailer, patterned after a report card, "and please encourage your neighbors to caucus as well. A follow-up notice may be issued following Monday’s caucuses."

Cruz's campaign quickly confirmed the origins of the mailer, even as Cruz endorser and radio host Steve Deace pronounced it fake. And Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate, a Republican, condemned it.

"Accusing citizens of Iowa of a 'voting violation' based on Iowa Caucus participation, or lack thereof, is false representation of an official act," he said in a statement. "There is no such thing as an election violation related to frequency of voting. Any insinuation or statement to the contrary is wrong and I believe it is not in keeping in the spirit of the Iowa Caucuses."

Sarah Rumpf reports at The Washington Examiner:

Tom Hinkeldey, a resident of Alta, Iowa, tweeted a photo (which was later deleted because it included his personal address) on Friday evening of a mailer Sen. Ted Cruz’s campaign sent addressed to his wife, Steffany. The mailer was a large card printed to look like a manila envelope on one side and was labeled in all capital letters, “ELECTION ALERT,” “VOTER VIOLATION,” “PUBLIC RECORD,” and “FURTHER ACTION NEEDED.”