Two very different ground games

How Trump and Harris are turning out their voters

I recently recorded a new Power & Flour Podcast episode with

John Hagner

devoted to understanding the respective ground games of the Harris and Trump campaigns. I wanted to add a few thoughts here.

One is that ground game efforts have demonstrable and measurable effects in presidential campaigns. Some research I’ve worked on here and here (with John Sides and Lynn Vavreck) found that, in 2008 and 2012, Obama did roughly half a percentage point better in counties where he had field offices than in counties where he did not. This was enough to flip several states. It’s a very expensive and labor intensive form of campaigning, but one that has a far better yield than other forms.

Another point is that Kamala Harris’ campaign is built on the previous efforts of the Obama, Clinton, and Biden campaigns, as well as the Voter Activation Network (VAN) system that has been around nearly 20 years, to produce a robust turnout organization with hundreds of field offices across the country. The Trump campaign, meanwhile, is pursuing an entrepreneurial and largely untested approach of outsourcing its ground game to Elon Musk and others through a “Trump Force 47” campaign. This could work, and there’s a lot of money involved, but it sounds like a lot of different volunteers are taking very different approaches to the task.

As John points out in the podcast, there’s an important history to why the Democrats have a two-decade old turnout infrastructure while the Republicans keep rebuilding and outsourcing theirs — Republicans have had a considerable internal factional rift over the past 20 years. The Trump people despise the Bush/Cheney people and vice versa, while the McCain people are their own group, and pretty much no one who was working in the GOP earlier than 2016 is still welcome there. By contrast, while there is a Clinton faction within the Democratic Party that is somewhat distinct from the Obama team, the lines are very blurry, and Harris draws from all across the party.

One final important point about GOTV that John makes in the podcast: Decades ago, it was quite common to see campaigns as divided into two very distinct phases and audiences. In the summer, you campaigned among high-propensity undecided voters and tried to persuade them, while in the fall, you campaigned among low-propensity voters favorable to your campaign and tried to get them to show up. This distinction was drilled into me by Matt Reese and others in my MA program in the 1990s. Today, that distinction is far less clear, and campaigning has aspects of both persuasion and turnout.

I hope you’ll listen to the podcast. It’s available on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, and elsewhere, and here’s the show page.