Senior political correspondent at The Guardian Hugo Lowell reported this week that “local Republican officials are raising the alarm that the Trump campaign’s ground game in battleground states is similar in size to a midterm, and the hiring spree by PACs may be coming too late.”
Addressing the campaign’s voter turnout operation, Lowell added: “RNC had roughly 350 staffers in battlegrounds states and roughly 50 in PA in 2022, per data we obtained…Trump campaign chafed at comparison and told me that they have more than 350 and more than 50. Meanwhile the Harris campaign claims to have roughly *375 staffers in PA alone.”
The Trump campaign’s response that it has “more than 50” voter turnout workers in the Keystone State, without specifying a bigger number, means that even if the figure is 50 percent higher, Harris’s foot soldiers likely outnumber Trump’s nearly 5-to-1 in Pennsylvania.
NEW — Local Republican officials are raising the alarm that the Trump campaign’s ground game in battleground states is similar in size to a midterm, and the hiring spree by PACs may be coming too late @guardian https://t.co/XCOarjAHat
— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) September 9, 2024
Scott Koon of the Capitol Insurrection Report podcast agrees that the RNC appears to be playing catch-up — or, as Koon suggests, playing a different game altogether that’s focused on less voting, not more voting.
Koon replied to Lowell: “It’s certainly too late. They also should have had a robust voter registration program and grown organically out of that, but instead they’re focusing on voter suppression. Basically shows their strategy isn’t based on winning more votes.”
[NOTE: The Brennan Center for Justice reports that “voter suppression has a long and ugly history in the United States, and over the last two decades, it has resurfaced with a vengeance.” Placing antagonistic volunteers at the polls to scrutinize voters, as the GOP promises to do, is a historically popular tactic used to disenfranchise marginalized — but legal — voters and minority votes.]
RNC co-chair Lara Trump has repeatedly boasted about training thousands of “election integrity” watchdogs to monitor poll watchers and has vowed to prosecute anyone caught cheating (“we will track you down”). Like her father-in-law, Ms. Trump refuses to accept that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election.
Following the same pattern in a threatening social media post last weekend, the former President sought to intimidate with promises to prosecute “cheaters” including “corrupt election officials” and even “donors.” (See text of post below.)
But whatever role — if any — suppressing the vote may play in the RNC’s strategy, the Trump campaign still needs to turn out its own supporters in November — a task that requires an adequate number of political boots on the ground.
In response to the idea that the RNC is running a full-throttle ground game, MAGA supporter Corbin Sabol, a member of the San Diego Republican Party Central Committee, replied to The Guardian report with snark: “Yes. We get it. Lots of corporate money allows the DNC to afford a lot of staffers.”
CEASE & DESIST: I, together with many Attorneys and Legal Scholars, am watching the Sanctity of the 2024 Presidential Election very closely because I know, better than most, the rampant Cheating and Skullduggery that has taken place by the Democrats in the 2020 Presidential Election. It was a Disgrace to our Nation! Therefore, the 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again. We cannot let our Country further devolve into a Third World Nation, AND WE WON’T! Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.
Donald Trump