Donald Trump is campaigning in Altoona and Erie, Pennsylvania today. Those are pretty good choices for him. The Altoona area should be a region where he picks up some votes, and Erie is a swing region that probably leans right. But Trump’s real problem in the Keystone State is his increasingly non-existent support in the Philadelphia suburbs. If he can’t turn that around, he’ll need unheard of turnout from the “Pennsyltucky” (a.k.a. the ‘T’) region of the state.
Visiting Altoona can help him there, but not if he doesn’t use it as an opportunity to activate volunteers and identify supporters. He needs a ground army to drag every last voter to the polls or he has no chance at all. And, yet, he says he doesn’t need any GOTV effort and he certainly doesn’t need the help of the RNC and their resources and contacts and lists.
“We are gonna have tremendous turnout from the evangelicals, from the miners, from the people that make our steel, from people that are getting killed by trade deals, from people that have been just decimated, from the military who are with Trump 100 percent,” he went on. “From our vets because I’m going to take care of the vets.”
“I don’t know that we need to get out the vote,” the Republican nominee concluded. “I think people that really want to vote, they’re gonna just get up and vote for Trump. And we’re going to make America great again.”
As an old Pennsylvania organizer who spent 2004 working for Project Vote to register and get out the vote in Delaware and Montgomery (suburban Philly) counties, I know that a good ground game can boost county-level turnout several percentage points. While it’s never possible to know what exact impact your organizing has had on an election, John Kerry did significantly better than Gore in the counties I organized even as he was doing less well statewide. On election day in 2004, my crews visited every name on my list three times or until we’d verified that they had voted. It made a difference, especially considering that long lines in places like Norristown cost us hundreds if not thousands of votes.
If the election isn’t close then obviously this grind-it-out type of ground game doesn’t matter (except, perhaps, for other races on the ballot), but we all remember Florida in 2000. And Barack Obama won North Carolina in 2008 and lost it in 2012 by a whisker.
For a candidate like Trump who is behind in the polls and banking on unprecedented turnout in his core areas of support, the indifference to a ground game is confounding.
