4/4
“The challenge in trying to run up the score in the margins is that there’s not a lot of juice left in that orange,” he said.
Lennox, the Michigan operative, said he doesn’t see the signs of a healthy campaign. No one in his family that is registered to vote absentee received outreach from Trump’s team or the state party when ballots went out, and he doesn’t see organizers in each county.
But he has been asked to be a poll watcher in Cheboygan County, Michigan, where elections are run by a Republican and Trump won in 2020 by a 2-to-1 margin.
“The idea that you’re going to have a Republican in a Republican County with a Republican clerk serve as a poll watcher instead of knock on doors or passing out yard signs is why you’re not going to run up the score where you need to,” Lennox said.
Working the refs
In its messaging around November’s election, the Republican National Committee has emphasized its “election integrity” work – highlighting litigation and efforts to recruit poll workers, lawyers and partisan poll watchers willing to monitor voting and ballot counting.
RNC co-chairs Michael Whatley and Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law, recently announced that the party has recruited 200,000 volunteers, double their original goal.
In North Carolina, the RNC and the state Republican Party last month successfully blocked students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from using their digital school ID when voting. In Georgia, another key presidential battleground, Trump allies have taken over the majority of seats on the state elections board and recently approved controversial rules that critics say could inject delays and chaos into certifying the presidential election in a state Trump lost by fewer than 12,000 votes in 2020. The election rules are being challenged in court.
In other battlegrounds – including Nevada and Michigan – the RNC has filed lawsuits alleging that election officials have failed to remove ineligible voters from the rolls.
In some key places, working the referees has replaced a traditional campaign altogether. In Nebraska, where the state awards electoral votes based on congressional district, Trump’s campaign hardly has a presence in the Omaha district President Joe Biden won in 2020, nor has it reserved any airtime for the final month of the race. Democrats, meanwhile, have spent $7 million on commercials there with another $5 million planned for the closing weeks.
Instead, Trump and his allies spent months pressuring the state’s Republican Gov. Jim Pillen to change the law in a special session and potentially block Harris from what could be a critical electoral college vote. Even if Harris won the “blue wall” states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania and carried no other key battlegrounds, she would still need the electoral vote from Nebraska’s 2nd District to secure the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House.
The push stalled – at least for now – when a Democrat-turned-Republican state senator from Omaha said he wouldn’t go along with Trump’s demands to change the rules this late in an election cycle.
Democrats view these efforts – coupled with Trump’s unusual approach to deploying a ground game – as evidence that he isn’t campaigning as hard to win as he is to challenge the outcome if he loses.
“Republicans are saying, ‘If we can’t get above 50% of the vote, let’s figure out how to disrupt the system,’” Danielle Butterfield, the executive director of Democratic-aligned Priorities USA, said of the Republicans’ focus on litigation that challenges election procedures. “Democrats are saying, ‘If it looks like we aren’t getting above 50%, let’s convince more voters to be part of our team.’”
Priorities USA operates both a super PAC that is spending heavily on digital advertising to drive turnout for Harris and other Democrats and a nonprofit arm that has a $20 million budget in this election cycle for litigation and voter-protection work.
https://lite.cnn.com/2024/10/04/politics/trump-campaign-ground-game/index.html