Behind the scenes of Trump’s big ground game gamble

Taylor has been working for Turning Point Action, an organization aimed at energizing young conservatives led by Charlie Kirk, a close Trump ally. Much of the ground game in the Grand Canyon state has been outsourced to third-party groups like this one, which has raised tens of millions of dollars to fund an army of hundreds of ballot-chasers.   

An Apache Junction resident, Taylor, has been door-knocking and calling a list of 600 people located in his rural neighborhood in the Sonoran Desert during the hottest-ever summer on record, laying the groundwork to get to know them on a personal level to persuade them to vote in the presidential and Senate races and on numerous propositions. 

“It’s crunch time, now that the ballots are out. Since July, we’ve been knocking doors, and that’s been a lot of heat. We try to do it in the afternoons to reach more people and find cooler weather,” Taylor said, equipped with a clipboard with an extensive spreadsheet full of contacts ahead of a canvass session on Friday.

“I’m just reaching people that are excited to vote and or apprehensive, and see if I can help people get over some of their own hurdles or answer any questions that might help them out,” Taylor said, speaking with the Washington Examiner.

Turning Point Action, headquartered in Phoenix, said it is operating statewide in Arizona and Wisconsin, two states that Trump lost in 2020. Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s America PAC is leading ground efforts across even more swing states and is funded by a nearly $75 million donation from the Tesla and X owner.

Turning Point Action is betting it all on turning out low-propensity Republican voters, who they know are conservative but have not participated in recent elections. The group developed a canvassing app within the last two years that ballot-chasers use to identify their target voters and will soon show which voters still have outstanding early ballots in their possession. 

“It will also show the address of the person, and then if they have a ballot and soon it’ll show if they don’t, if they’ve already turned their ballot in,” Taylor said, pointing to the application on his phone. “I’m just trying to reach those that still have their ballot in hand — and right now, that’s everybody and a lot of people still haven’t got their ballot yet.”

In the scorching sun, Taylor goes door to door, equipped with campaign literature and Trump yard signs in his neighborhood, which is known to be a Republican stronghold.

At the first house he visits, a man he engages with already on the front porch recognizes Taylor from previous rounds of outreach. Despite failing to vote in 2020, the voter tells Taylor he intends to support Trump at the polls on Election Day and expresses interest in displaying a yard sign.  

“I’ll just go ahead, I have another house to hit, so I’m going to just leave it here, and I’ll come back with a hammer,” Taylor said, motioning to the yard sign. “I don’t go to doors with a hammer in hand.” 

As Taylor walks to the next house, he explains his goal is to make 10 contacts a day and 50 a week – whether it is face-to-face or via phone. 

Darla Talbot, a voter who works two full-time jobs, answers the next door Taylor knocks on, and says she received her ballot and intends to drop it off in the next few days. She tells Taylor she will vote for Trump early but needs some help understanding the propositions on the ballot.

“This year, they sent out a phone book and said here, do your homework,” Taylor said, handing her a yellow paper with Turning Point Action’s position on each of the initiatives. “These are some conservative views on the ballot measures.”

Mario Chicas, 47, is Taylor’s manager at Turning Point Action. He said he oversees about 20 other full-time employees. 

“This is the fun part. You get to see ballots going in the box, all this hard work we’ve done, all this preparation, all these different maneuvering that we’ve done,” Chicas explained. “I told my team, enjoy this, this is fun, getting to see the numbers coming off the board.”

FEC ruling opens up ‘brand new world’

The Trump campaign is heavily relying on door-to-door efforts from third-parties, a strategy that hasn’t been seen in a presidential campaign. Republicans are taking advantage of a Federal Election Commission decision earlier this year that grants campaigns the ability to coordinate with outside political action committees on paid canvassing. 

“It’s a brand new world, basically in April of this year, where federal campaigns and presidential campaigns are really encouraged and incentivized by the FEC to work with outside groups,” said Tyler Bowyer, the chief operating officer of Turning Point Action.  

In addition to the paid chase-the-vote operation, the group is training and bringing in volunteers from outside the state to door knock in precincts they’ve identified as less important. In a post on X, Kirk wrote this month that Turning Point Action had assigned a full-time staffer or volunteer to chase every low-propensity voter in Arizona. 

When the Washington Examiner visited Turning Point Action’s offices in Phoenix, a group of volunteers from Salt Lake City, known to have a large community of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, were being trained. The move was purposeful as both campaigns are courting the LDS support in Arizona. 

Bowyer admitted the group isn’t focused on persuading swing voters in a state where just a few thousand votes could mean victory or defeat for candidates up and down the ballot. Republicans currently make up 35% of all registered voters, while Democrats are at 29% and nonpartisan registration is around 29%, according to voter registration numbers released by the Arizona Secretary of State in July.

“In a perfect world where you’re doing really well, you start with your base voters, which are your Republicans, then you move into your Independents. So, in the state of Arizona we have so many Republicans that are untapped, so we have to start there,” Bowyer said. “There’s only so many people that I could turn out per day as a full time person on the ground. So, it’s just a sheer numbers game.”

Experts on both sides emphasize that ground game operations don’t always translate to victory. Trump won in 2016 with minimal field staff in battleground states, while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had a well-funded operation. However, some GOP operatives and strategists are unsure that only turning out the low-propensity Republicans in swing states is a winning strategy. 

“If this works, it will be considered a brilliant move since others have failed to mobilize these kinds of voters in the past. If it doesn’t work, there’s going to be a lot of ‘I told you so,’” said Dennis Lennox, a Republican consultant based in Michigan. 

Democrats in Arizona and across the country have had an edge for years when it comes to technology and organizing, with Bowyer admitting that developing an application was crucial to keep up.

“The left has been really good at this. What they’ve done is they’ve brought in dozens of groups in most of the key target states,” he said. “So we looked at that and said, ‘Hey we have to help, we have to help our party do this work’, specifically with the get out the vote.”

Harris campaign builds out traditional operation to sway voters

With over 200 full-time staff located in over 19 offices, the Harris campaign said last weekend they had 7,500 canvass and phone banking shifts scheduled. They knocked over 26,000 doors and made half a million phone calls, calling it the Arizona campaign’s biggest weekend of action so far. Those numbers do not account for its many allied groups. 

Since July 21, the number of volunteers that have signed up online is over 70,000, the Harris campaign said, claiming they had already knocked on more doors than any previous Arizona-coordinated campaign. Not only is the campaign and outside groups associated with it going after their core base, but they are also looking to sway moderate Republicans and independent voters, forming coalitions to help turn out those voters in the state.

Stacy Pearson, a Democratic strategist based in Phoenix, called the Democrat’s ground operations one of the most “sophisticated” she’s seen in years, adding they’ve been able to build off data collected over the last several cycles. They’re working to follow up on the successes of 2022, in which Democrats won all of the top statewide offices and have a shot to flip two seats in each chamber in the statehouse, which could put them in charge of the legislature for the first time in 60 years.

“What I’m most excited about is their focus on families with mixed registration status. So, if there’s an Independent and a Democrat or a Democrat or Republican, I mean, they are really dialing into the numbers,” Pearson explained. “Even if every Democrat in Arizona votes for Harris, there’s 100% support, she still needs a portion of the independents and Republicans to succeed, and so the ground game has been laser-focused on that.”

Pearson said she’s seen the Democratic ground game in action in her neighborhood.

“We are all Democrats in my house, so they are not door-knocking me, which is a great sign. I’ve seen them at the neighbor’s house next door, two college-educated Independents who just moved here from California, I’ve seen them there a couple times already,” she said.

Trump’s team said they have “almost a dozen offices across the state,” and “hundreds of paid staff” and over 300 offices across the battleground states. The campaign did not provide specific numbers of paid staff in Arizona or numbers of doors knocked. 

They are largely focusing on training volunteers called “Trump Force 47 captains,” which is a joint effort of the campaign and the Republican National Committee. An RNC spokesperson said they have over “27,000 trained Trump Force 47 Captains and continue to train daily, adding thousands per week.”  

Stolen election claims and criminal indictments

The Arizona Republican Party has undergone a transformation in recent years after moderate members, specifically those who have not endorsed Trump’s stolen-election theory, have been kicked to the curb. Many in the state point to Turning Point Action’s role in reshaping the party. 

“It’s not a party, it’s not the GOP anymore, It’s MAGA – and Turning Point has choreographed that, that has been their deal,” said Chuck Coughlin, a longtime GOP consultant who worked for John McCain, who left the Republican Party under Trump. “They have infiltrated the entire Republican Party structure out here. They recruited precinct committeemen to be Republican precinct committeemen, and they have overtaken the party.”

“It’s not anything resembling the GOP of ‘10, ‘12 or ‘14 or even ‘18,” Coughlin said. “We’ve seen the results of that: back-to-back statewide losses.”

Bowyer, who at one time was co-chair of the RNC’s grassroots committee, was indicted by a grand jury in Maricopa County in April 2024 on felony charges stemming from an alleged plan to keep Trump in the White House by using alternative electors to declare Trump the 2020 winner. In 2022, Bowyer also led a push to oust Arizona State House speaker Rusty Bowers after he refused to endorse Trump’s stolen-election theory. 

🚨🚨BREAKING: Arizona’s Democrat Attorney General, Kris Mayes, who received just 280 votes more than her Republican opponent, is pursuing radical and unprecedented criminal charges against seven attorneys for Donald Trump over efforts to contest the 2020 presidential election in… https://t.co/DDASYssHDY

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) April 25, 2024

Kirk has vehemently defended Bowyer and the charges from Arizona’s Democratic Attorney General, Kris Meyes, calling them an attempt to weaponize the justice system. 

“The Arizona Trump electors were doing what they thought was a legally necessary step as part of a wider political and electoral dispute,” Kirk said in a post on X in April. “They acted in the belief that Donald Trump was the true winner of Arizona in the 2020 election. They engaged in no fraud and no deception. In fact, they literally published a press release explaining what they were doing!”

Last cycle, Trump and Kirk had voiced concerns about voting by mail, questioning if ballots were susceptible to fraud. Many believe those comments ultimately put Republicans at a disadvantage after discouraging a convenient way to vote during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Arizona specifically, there were long lines and voting machine malfunctions on Election Day that primarily affected Republicans who hadn’t cast early ballots.

This cycle, the Trump campaign and Turning Point Action are reversing course and are encouraging voters to cast a ballot early. The group said they aren’t attempting to convert Election Day voters into early voters, but are just focused on getting low-propensity voters to turn out this cycle and are educating them about all the ways they are able to vote. 

Republicans in the state and across the country are sounding the alarm over outsourcing critical get-out-the-vote efforts to Turning Point Action and Elon Musk’s America PAC, both of which have little experience running successful field programs. One GOP consultant told the Washington Examiner they have concerns that outside groups are reinventing the wheel and disregarding data that has already been collected in previous cycles. 

“There’s a Republican data ecosystem, so for example, I can use data from the RNC as an individual expenditure committee helping Republicans, and I can buy that data from the central hub, I knock on doors, learn new information, and put that information back into the hub and all of the sudden I can use it,” the person said, speaking on the condition of anonymity in an effort to reflect candidly on the situation. “Because it’s not owned by the RNC, Turning Point isn’t sharing any of that information either.”

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“The stuff from Turning Point, they aren’t tracking it all in the same way,” the GOP source said.

The person also said the political climate is favorable to a Trump win in Arizona, but victory is far from certain.