Trump’s ground game relies on untraditional strategies to draw out battleground voters

By Steve Contorno and Fredreka Schouten, CNN Updated: 9:19 AM EDT, Fri October 4, 2024

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When absentee ballots first landed on doorsteps in Michigan last month, so did Paul Hudson, a Grand Rapids lawyer and a Republican running to represent the area in Congress. Armed with an app that told him where likely voters lived and which houses might be swayed, he spent that morning walking a densely populated purple community where single-story ranches with Trump flags neighbor homes with “Harris Walz” signs on their lush, well-manicured lawns.

It’s a conventional strategy to compete in close races, one battle-tested by campaigns big and small every election. And it’s a playbook that former President Donald Trump’s campaign has tossed aside.

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 thestate, 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 andRepublican 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 peoplewho 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.”

Trump’s campaign believes the approach is reflective of the candidate they are trying to get across the finish line in a narrow race against Vice President Kamala Harris – one whose celebrity and brash style grants him unique appeal among those who don’t often vote but whose first turn in the White House turned off many swing voters that candidates traditionally fight for.

That work is taking place in parts of the country that the Trump campaign never set foot in four years ago, Trump’s political director James Blair said. In Michigan, for example, Trump’s 2020 campaign concentrated their outreach efforts in the Detroit suburbs and around Grand Rapids, according to an internal data mapping where the campaign spoke to voters. This time, the map, reviewed by CNN, shows much more intense activity throughout less populated central Michigan as well as more activity in Detroit, where the campaign says it is making a coordinated push for Black men.

Blair said voters who turned against Trump won’t change their mind because someone knocked on their door.

“We have a narrower view than others who is effectively persuadable at a door,” Blair said. “But what a door is very good at is turnout, particularly for low and mid propensity voters who don’t regularly get contacted by campaigns and may need an explanation of what their voting options are.”

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The escalating and overlapping efforts of groups, though, has at times caused confusion on the ground.

At a gathering hosted this summer in Detroit by Turning Point Action, attendees at a Trump Force 47 information session were told in detail about the operation to target low-propensity voters.

One woman flummoxed by the presentation asked if she was allowed to volunteer for Turning Point and the campaign. A man who came from Ohio noted all the organizing groups and apps.

He then probed the organizers: “How do we make sure this all works together?”

Low-propensity voters

Trump’s battleground strategy is one his Florida operatives first piloted four years ago en route to a 3.4-point victory in their state.

His team on the ground there carved up the Sunshine State into dozens of subgroups and picked out the communities where they believed targeted messaging could drive irregular voters and some traditional Democrats to their side. Not all of them – not even most of them – but enough to cobble together a statewide win.

They launched an outreach program for African-American men in the majority Black city of Miami Gardens, put fliers featuring outspoken Democratic opponents of Israel on the doorstep of every Jewish household in south Florida, advertised extensively on Spanish-language radio and bombarded Cuban and Venezuelan voters with messages tying then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden to the socialism found in their native countries.

The results were undeniable. Trump won nearly 4 in 10 Jewish votes, the best performance by a Republican in two decades, and he fared better in counties with large Puerto Rican populations. Cubans, meanwhile, helped fuel Trump’s 23-point improvement in voter rich Miami-Dade County.

The architect of his Florida win, Susie Wiles, is now co-piloting his entire operation while one of her top lieutenants in the Sunshine State, Blair, is helping deploy their successful strategy across the electoral map.

“A lot of campaigns on both sides of the aisle historically spent extraordinary time and money doubling and tripling down on the part of the cake that is already baked and immovable,” Blair told CNN. “And all the time, money and manpower spent there are resources not spent on using a scalpel at the edges to nip-tuck the electorate in your favor – which is really what an election at this level is.”

He added: “We look at every state like a jigsaw puzzle. It’s a state-by-state, area-by-area, demographic-by-demographic math problem to figure out where you can maximize marginal gains from a raw vote perspective to achieve the number of votes you need to win under any turnout scenario.”

Some of those efforts are targeting people Trump has lamented don’t show up to vote in greater numbers, like gun owners and Evangelicals. Others were born out of a longstanding desire by Trump to drive a wedge between Democrats and union households as well as Black and Hispanic men. His campaign has also reached out to Libertarians and Bitcoin enthusiasts, believing Trump’s promises to upend traditional institutions is appealing in those communities.

Trump’s campaign has also tried to seize on discord within the Democratic coalition. The campaign didn’t plan to target Arab American citizens in Michigan or Catholic voters in Pennsylvania, two historically Democratic leaning groups. But his campaign targeted Michigan’s Arab communities not long after war broke out between Israel and Hamas last year. And in the months after Democrats replaced Biden, a Catholic, with Harris, a Baptist with a Jewish husband, Trump has posted on social media about the Virgin Mary and the archangel Michael, two figures central to the Catholic faith.

One person with knowledge of Trump’s strategy put it this way: “You figure out how to inject adrenaline into a situation that benefits you, and then you push gravity in that direction.”

Many Republican operatives remain skeptical. A GOP strategist in Arizona said Trump’s allies are focusing their efforts on turning out diehard voters in the state and are making no real effort to be “competitive in swing areas.”

He thinks that’s a mistake.

“It didn’t work in 2020. It didn’t work in 2022,” he said, referring to losses by Trump-aligned Republicans in the midterms in Arizona. “Why do we think it will suddenly work in 2024?

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