Inside the Trump Campaign's Voter Turnout Cluster F@#k

I can't believe a campaign run by scammers and influencers isn't reaching swing voters.

With both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump being well-known, uninspiring candidates, the contest's victor will be decided by whoever can turn out more voters. As CNN’s Election Day countdown rolls into single digits, both campaigns are trying to motivate low-propensity voters to the polls. For Harris, that means activating unenthusiastic, Democrat-leaning independents while attempting to court Never-Trump Republicans. For Trump, it means re-attracting the young males energized by his prior bids but have fallen off the Trump Train. This dynamic materialized in a pair of odd last-minute celebrity showcases: Barrack Obama and Eminem hosting a Harris rally in Michigan while Donald Trump flies to Texas to appear on Joe Rogan’s podcast.

While Harris is burdened by her nonsensical decision to court non-MAGA Republicans with the help of the Cheney family, Trump faces a more significant challenge. Not only are there strong doubts he can recreate the energy of 2016, but his voter turnout operation (a.k.a. his “ground game”) has been decimated by the same grifting and echo chamber effect that plagues the conservative moment.

Influencers Are Bad Organizers

Earlier this year, Donald Trump gave every Republican operative a heart attack by appointing Turning Point USA and its founder, Charlie Kirk, the de-facto voter turnout arm of his campaign.¹ If you’re unfamiliar with Turning Point and Mr. Kirk, I’m extremely jealous of you. TPUSA, as it’s known, began in 2012 as a conservative student group that hosted right-wing speakers on college campuses. If you’ve ever seen a video of Ben Shapiro screaming at a too-young-to-drink college freshman, that was probably a TPUSA event. 

A 2018 TPUSA event in which Kirk took on the woke agenda of — *checks notes* — Texas Christian University.

As soon as Turning Point began, wealthy Republican donors poured money into Kirk’s operation, seeing it as a way to combat the “college wokeness” Fox News warned them about. (One of my college friends, the philanthropic chair of a small fraternity in Burlington, Vermont, was approached by TPUSA with promises of lavish gifts and dinners if he aligned with them.) Backed by the mega-millionaires and riding the “colleges are too liberal!” wave that rises every eight years, Kirk exploded into a GOP celebrity overnight. He spoke at CPAC, became an advisor to Donald Trump Jr., and, like any good opportunist, made a lot of money along the way. However, while Kirk is adept at owning the libs on www dot YouTube dot com, these skills don’t transfer to political success.

During the 2022 midterms, Kirk directed 76% of TPUSA’s $494 million budget toward Arizona’s candidates for the state’s Senate, governor, and Secretary of State seats. (TPUSA relocated to Arizona in 2018, hoping to turn the state into a MAGA bastion.) All of these candidates lost. Kirk’s strongest critics outside of Arizona were Republican candidates who had enlisted TPUSA to organize their campaigns.

“As a candidate who didn’t win and who was promised that Turning Point would have a big influence in Michigan, it makes you crazy. I gave up a salary for 18 months, sold my car, and did everything I could to run for office. And people like Charlie Kirk are the reason we are not winning.” — Tudor Dixon, TPUSA-backed candidate for Michigan’s 2022 governor race.

Promising to do better, Kirk convinced Trump to make TPUSA’s political advocacy wing, TP Action or Turning Point PAC, the primary mechanism to mobilize voters for the 2024 election. I’ll give you three guesses as to how it went.

Trump and Kirk at a TPUSA panel in 2018.

As you probably assumed, Kirk did… bad. When presented with Kirk’s plans to turn out “hunters and churchgoers,” two groups that Trump already has support from,² GOP Republican strategist Tyler Montague was aghast:

“Their strategy is bad. They know how to talk MAGA. They know how to message the base. But they literally don’t know what to say to a swing voter. They alienate these people.”

If TPUSA’s strategy frustrates GOP strategists, I can only imagine their thoughts on its execution. In a bizarre move, Turning Point chose to organize door knockers and record voter data on its proprietary app. This would be fine, but TPUSA has refused to share results with Data Trust, the go-to GOP voter identification firm.³ Not only does this secrecy hurt Trump’s chances of winning, but it means down-ballot Republican campaigns are not receiving the national campaign’s voter profiles. Given his long history of personal embellishment (Kirk lives in a gated house worth $7 million), it’s fair to posit Kirk plans to sell TPUSA content to voters after the election and doesn’t want it going to other conservative outlets. Even if TPUSA’s tactic works for Trump, it will likely lead to fewer Republicans being elected to the House and Senate, stagnating the MAGA agenda. And we haven’t even reached the real kicker.

---

Now, back to the article.

---

Turning Point’s voter app is made by Superfeed, which has financial ties to TPUSA. Both Kirk’s mother-in-law and Turning Point’s chief operating officer are on the Superfeed board, which is a clear conflict of interest since TPUSA charges Republican campaigns to use the app. Furthermore, the app willingly gives private information to anyone who signs up — even me. Below is a screenshot I took 30 seconds after downloading the app. Each numbered dot includes a person’s home address, name, phone number, and other personal information, readily available for me, a stranger to access. Yikes.

As Charlie Kirk’s operation continued to be a mess of lies, profiteering, and inability to reach stated deadlines, Donald Trump decided he needed someone who was none of those things. So, he turned to the always-trustworthy Elon Musk.

Enter Elon

In July of this year, Musk founded America PAC to aid Donald Trump’s campaign. he quickly became the lead organizer for the Wisconsin and Pennsylvania campaigns, two must-win states for Trump. While I am neither a politician nor a consultant, I think handing last-minute voter turnout to a man whose only political credential is backing Ron DeSantis’s short-lived primary campaign is a bad idea.

When you really need someone to meet a deadline.

Founded less than four months before the election, Musk’s America PAC has shown little promise of being any better than TPUSA. Over the summer, Musk fired two voter turnout vendors, September Group and In Field Strategies.⁴ He replaced them with Blitz, a subsidiary of GP3, a company owned by political strategists who are currently running America PAC.⁵ Furthermore, Musk has brought back his friends Phil Cox and Generra Peck, two strategists who assisted the train wreck DeSantis’ bid and encouraged DeSantis to announce his campaign on an audio-only Twitter space.⁶

Putting aside the unproven leadership and self-enrichment, America PAC has faced the same problem as other well-funded but unpopular campaigns. In a recent video obtained by The Guardian, a user shows how “volunteers” are tricking America PAC’s door-knocking app into thinking they were canvassing. Not only does this cost this America PAC resources (they pay their canvassers), but it leaves the campaign with an unclear vision of who they need to mobilize in the coming weeks.

While America PAC released a statement downplaying the situation, internal leaks show volunteer fraud is a top concern. Chris Young, a longtime Musk/GOP aide, recently flew to Nevada on suspicion door-knocking tallies had been inflated. A manager from Lone Mountain Strategies, the Nevada-based turnout operation, sent the below text message to an un-identified staffer that was leaked to Reuters.

"Our auditors keep catching people cheating. We've fired two people today and auditors are going around checking doors for flyers."

---

---

In a move indicative of the campaign’s panic, Musk announced any swing state voter who signs his “petition” (really a voter ID list) would receive $47. He later upped it to $100, then announced a daily $1 million raffle for signees. The Justice Department sent a cease and desist letter to Musk, warning of the illegality (because, duh), but the legal concerns are the least of their issues. If your swing state turnout strategy is paying people to join a list so you can spend more money encouraging them to vote, then I doubt your election night party will be as fun as you hope. Given the state of disarray, it’s no wonder why Trump’s Wisconsin operation has reportedly knocked only 10% of the doors it did in 2016.⁷

You don’t say!

While Trump’s turnout dumpster fire may seem like a unique disaster caused by three bumbling trust-fund babies who have never organized anything larger than a flight to Epstein’s island, it’s sign of a much deeper symptom of the modern Republican Party. Despite its “anti-establishment” rhetoric, the GOP is run by the ilk of Trump and Musk: capitalists who have only made money by ripping off others, usually their workers. Naturally, as the party bent the knee to the proprietor of Trump University, those who rise through it will have modeled themselves off his image. People like Kirk, who want to promote the conservative agenda, but only as a subsequent objective to making sure they get rich along the way. Regardless of if he wins or loses, the get-rich-quick nature of the GOP will remain a problem for the party, and the American people, long after Donald Trump overdoses on Diet Coke.

Like every other political commentator scarred by the 2016 upset, I won’t try to predict who will win. But what I will say is that after examining the Trump’s virtually non-existence ground game, and considering this election will be determined by turnout, I’d much rather stake my wagon on a Harris victory.

---

If you appreciated or learned something from this article, please like (click the ❤️), send it to a friend, and subscribe. If you feel you get one-beer’s worth of value from a month of JoeWrote, please consider supporting my work with a premium subscription. It’s cheap, worth it, and you’ll get exclusive bonus content. Thanks!

In Solidarity — Joe

1. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/jun/25/charlie-kirk-turning-point-usa-chase-the-vote-trump

2. https://apnews.com/article/trump-turning-point-voter-mobilization-musk-07286c2572b02aafefdda1cda093e788

3. https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/spotlights/2024/turning-point-wants-to-revolutionize-how-republicans-turn-out-voters-some-are-skeptical/

4. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/17/trump-american-pac-voter-turnout-operation-arizona-nevada

5. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/26/trump-voter-turnout-elon-musk-pac

6. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/elon-musk-trump-super-pac-desantis-1235083012/

7. https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/trump-campaign-strategy-election-2024-6fe8719d