Republicans forced to get creative as pro-Trump get-out-the-vote effort falls short

While swing state Republican officials, former Republican National Committee leaders and strategists are ringing alarm bells over the party's lackluster get-out-the-vote effort, some pro-Trump organizers suggest that the GOP ground game is successfully targeting voters at the margins.

In the spring, the conservative activist group Turning Point USA announced a plan to spend more than $100 million on a marquee “Chase the Vote” program, aimed at getting low-propensity Republican-leaning voters who might not have voted in 2020 or 2022 out to the polls.

However, the lofty goals set by the organization are meeting a more modest reality. According to Federal Elections Commission disclosures, Turning Point PAC has only raised about $2 million this cycle, with the bulk of their funding coming from the conservative Right for American organization, real estate developer Stephen Wynn and the Claremont Institute’s Thomas Klingenstein. 

The Turning Point PAC has also only spent about $1.1 million, a far cry from the $108 million Turning Point Action promised earlier this year. While the greater Turning Point organization may be deploying other resources via a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, a member admitted to Semafor that the organization has not met their fundraising and spending goals.

A spokesperson for Turning Point Action told Salon after publication that the PAC "never aimed to raise $108 million" and is unrelated to the "Chase the Vote" effort. 

"Chase the Vote is run through The 501c4 called Turning Point Action, and we have been extremely successful raising funds there," the spokesperson said. "We have raised tens of millions of dollars, enough to blanket two entire states with hundreds of full-time ballot chasers in each Wisconsin and Arizona, and we are staffing two additional congressional districts in Michigan and Nevada, plus we have additional staff in multiple other key states including Georgia and Pennsylvania. Regardless of the final amount raised, Chase the Vote has been a massive success and is poised to have a very impactful October and November."

Federal Election Commission records do not show any financial disclosures from Turning Point Action since 2022.

Turning Point’s failure to meet its fundraising and spending goals highlights broader issues with the get-out-the-vote tactics being deployed by the RNC and GOP-friendly groups in 2024. 

The plan from Republicans revolved around the efforts by the RNC and former President Donald Trump’s campaign to deploy their combined resources under the banner of “Trump Force 47.” The plan included mirroring some successful tactics deployed by Democrats, like partnering with local issue-focused organizations, as well as a neighbor-to-neighbor get-out-the-vote scheme, where more enthusiastic Republican voters recruit their less enthusiastic friends to make a plan to vote early, by mail or on election day.

However, it doesn't look like the GOP's direct efforts are on par with the Democrats’ program this year. In Georgia, for instance, the RNC said in an email it had recruited some 10,000 volunteers to help with get-out-the-vote efforts. Democrats, meanwhile, report having recruited upwards of 35,000 volunteers. Nationally, the RNC says that it has recruited some 100,000 volunteers, about one-quarter of the 400,000 volunteers Democrats say they’ve recruited to support Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign. 

It’s notable too that the RNC’s “Protect the Vote” program, part of their “Election Integrity Department,” has absorbed some portion of the enthusiasm of the party’s faithful this year, despite the fact that the department’s legal teams and poll watching programs are unlikely to get voters to the polls.

In private, some Republican strategists have expressed concern that the get-out-the-vote plan isn’t going as well as they’d hoped. The Guardian also reports that some within the party regard the current hiring spree by the GOP and some of the committees supporting it may come too late in the cycle to make the difference.

However, there are signs that the constellation of pro-Republicans outside groups angling to get low-propensity conservative voters to the polls this year are meeting with success on the margins and that this might be all that it takes to win.

Cliff Maloney, the founder of the conservative Citizens Alliance organization, said that he sees the perceived messiness as a sign that the GOP is taking voter turnout efforts more seriously this year and that some of the Republicans griping over the apparent messiness of the efforts this year are used to a party that was behind the Democrats in terms of its ground game.

“Under [RNC Chair Michael] Whatley and under [co-chair] Lara Trump I’ve been extremely impressed,” Maloney said. “I’m extremely positive on the GOP now under new leadership and you’re going to have a lot of people from the old leadership who are unhappy.”

According to Maloney, the overarching goal of his organization and other outside groups working on get-out-the-vote efforts is not to reach parity with Democrats in terms of mail-in balloting but just to improve on where they were in 2020.

In Pennsylvania, for instance, Republicans accounted for 25% of mail-in ballot requests. Maloney says that, according to his organization’s models, Trump could win the state even if they only increase that number to 27%. Their goal is to get it to 33%.

To accomplish this, his “PA Chase” program has recruited 120 full-time ballot chasers who wouldn’t be reported as members of the RNC or the Trump campaign’s staff. They’re also working to improve the proportion of ballots Republicans return. In 2020 in Pennsylvania, Democrats returned 88% of ballots requested while Republicans returned just 79% of the ballots they requested.

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Behind the scenes, Maloney also said that his group maintains an FEC-compliant data-sharing agreement with the RNC. PA Chase, for instance, uses this data to maintain an app that helps their ballot chasers organize their efforts and contact voters.

“I think that Democrats have worked through the messiness for a long time, this is just the first time Republicans have done it,” Maloney said.

One organizer with Turning Point also indicated in a phone call that they see their efforts in Pennsylvania as a success and that the pro-Republican efforts have doubled the number of mail-in ballot requests from 2022. This would still only put total Republican mail-in ballot requests in line with the 2020 presidential election. In 2022, about 303,000 Republicans requested a mail-in ballot in Pennsylvania. In 2020, Republicans requested about 785,000 mail-in ballots in the Keystone State.

The same organizer indicated that the group was getting creative in an attempt to reach low-propensity voters describing one plan to get a single voter to recruit 100 other voters to make a plan to vote. Turning Point also says it’s been going after Amish residents in Pennsylvania with a culturally conservative message and by telling people that the state’s governor, Josh Shapiro, is cracking down on the sale of raw milk.

Other conservative activists like Scott Pressler, who founded the Early Vote Action PAC, have also highlighted the raw milk angle in Pennsylvania. Pressler’s Early Vote Action committee has raised about $512,000 this year.

When asked about the ground operations of Republican-leaning groups, a spokesperson for the Harris campaign expressed confidence in the Democrats’ efforts, highlighting Harris’s “New Way Forward” barnstorming tour, where Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz are set to visit every media market in every battleground state in the days after the debate.

The Harris campaign also pointed to a recent memo from campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillion, in which she said that the campaign has opened some 312 offices and hired 2,000 staffers across the battleground states and indicated that the campaign is not taking anything for granted.

Neither a Turning Point USA nor a spokesperson for the RNC immediately replied to a request for comment.

Editor's note: The headline for this article previously stated that Turning Point PAC was 99% short of its spending goals. It has been updated to reflect Turning Point Action's claims about the overall get-out-the-vote effort.