Sean Simmers/The Patriot-News via AP
Elon Musk speaks at Life Center Church in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, October 19, 2024. Musk and his super PAC have taken over Donald Trump’s national canvassing effort.
This story is part of the Prospect’s on-the-ground Election 2024 coverage. You can find all the other stories here.
WILKES-BARRE, PENNSYLVANIA – My hometown in Northeast Pennsylvania is about as close to the epicenter of the 2024 presidential election as you can get. This is one of the swingiest regions in the most important swing state. As a result, every day my mailbox is stuffed with political mailers, my phone is ringing off the hook, and every day I get probably 20 or 30 text messages from campaigns, pollsters, and groups begging me to return my mail-in ballot NOW. (I will get around to it very soon, I promise.)
The ground game is a different story. While I have gotten entire forests’ worth of conservative mailers, especially from local GOP Assembly candidate Dino Disler, I have only been door-knocked by liberals—four times and counting, at the time of writing—twice from the Harris campaign, and twice from the Progressive Turnout Project.
The lack of Republicans canvassing me could be because I’m in their databases as a reliable Democrat. But if so, why am I getting so many conservative mailers? Furthermore, as I’ve walked and driven around town, it’s clear that Wilkes-Barre is simply crawling with liberal canvassers, who can be identified by their Harris-Walz merch, particularly the amusing camouflage hats. Even Christine Baranski, the Emmy Award-winning actress from The Good Wife and The Gilded Age, is knocking on doors in Wilkes-Barre, apparently to get out the Polish American vote (which is plentiful!).
But I have not seen a single Trump canvasser anywhere. The only conservative activist I’ve seen was what appeared to be a middle-school age kid in a Trump costume sitting in the road median near a beer store waving some flags. (Alas, I neglected to get an interview, as I had other pressing business, and have not been able to find him again.)
Local friends inform me that this was not the case in 2020 or 2016. Sean Cole, a volunteer working the desk at the Luzerne County Democratic Party office, told me that, despite the pandemic throwing a wrench into voter contact, there were plenty of Republican canvassers around that year. “This time, they’re having to pay people,” he said. “All our people are volunteers, and we’ve got people from as far away as Colorado.”
What is happening? I reached out to the offices of a local Republican state Assembly member and a Republican state senator, with no luck. The same was true of the Republican National Committee, and the Pennsylvania GOP. Elon Musk’s America PAC—which, sure enough, is advertising $30 an hour to canvassers in swing states—does not appear to have a press contact, though if it did it would probably respond with an automatic poop emoji. Staff at the Luzerne County Republican Party office informed me that journalists are not allowed in the building.
From other reporting, it seems that Trump cronies and Musk, who is funding a large chunk of the operation himself, have thrown out the traditional playbook and opted for a highly unusual strategy of focusing their canvassing operation on a smaller group of people who are less likely to vote. A local Trump campaign official confirmed this narrative. “This time our ground game is more focused and targeted on low-propensity voters,” he said. “We’re not flooding the zone,” though he insisted that they did have people working doors in Wilkes-Barre.
Elon Musk has no prior experience in the logistics of a national canvassing operation.
It must be admitted that there’s something to this argument. Repeatedly knocking on the door of someone who has already made up their mind and is certain to vote—like myself—is a waste of time. But not doing so is also risky. Democrats canvass likely Democratic voters to make sure they turn in their ballots early, or to find new volunteers, or just to make sure people have a plan to vote. In other cases, they target genuine swing voters, people who vote in elections but need some persuasion.
Turning out low-propensity voters, by definition, is hard. Rural households are far apart, so canvassing time is less productive. For every actually certain partisan, you might miss a wobbly partisan, or a distracted one who would otherwise forget to turn in their ballot. We’ll find out soon whether the Trump strategy worked out.
Recall that back in February, Trump threw out Ronna McDaniel as the head of the RNC and replaced her with his daughter-in-law Lara Trump. The national canvassing effort was turned over to Turning Point USA, an outfit for conservative college students run by Charlie Kirk with no canvassing experience. That effort seems to have largely collapsed outside of Arizona, and Elon Musk has stepped into the void with his America PAC.
The Washington Post reported on America PAC last week. Musk, who is famously disdainful of advertising (Tesla doesn’t do it at all), has focused mostly on mailers and canvassing. But he’s also infamous for megalomaniac ambitions, slapdash technical execution, and impulsively firing contractors and staffers en masse. This has indeed happened at America PAC, as during the summer, Musk abruptly tossed three vendors who had been brought on to do canvassing work. Like Kirk, Musk also has no prior experience in the logistics of a national canvassing operation.
The Post followed a Musk canvasser in Wisconsin, who had been fired by one America PAC vendor only to be hired by another, and found her efforts stymied by an app that repeatedly glitched out and sent her to inappropriate doors. The Guardian reports that this may be due to the app’s high bandwidth requirements. Remote rural areas—like where low-propensity voters tend to live—commonly have bad cellphone service.
Worse, a separate Guardian report finds that nonpartisan employees pressured only to fill numbers on a spreadsheet may be resorting to faking the stats. About one-quarter of the door-knocks allegedly made in Arizona and Nevada could be “potentially fraudulent,” sources and leaked data indicate.
Perhaps as an insurance policy, Musk has started offering payments to Pennsylvania voters. He first offered $47 and then $100 to residents who would sign a right-wing petition, probably to get around the fact that vote-buying or payments to register to vote are against federal law (though lawyers argue this is still illegal). Musk then further offered a daily $1 million lottery drawing for one signee per day. That arguably also runs afoul not only of election law but also of state lottery regulations, which categorically ban all gambling operations that are not specifically authorized.
Laws aside, this is comically at odds with the goal of targeting low-propensity voters. I would be shocked if thousands of liberals had not signed the petition simply to get the free $100 and a chance at a million bucks. Taken together, it all suggests an operation that, much like with Tesla’s atrocious build quality, is not run by some engineering super-genius.
All of this is so far anecdotal, though it fits a pattern of reporting elsewhere. It’s important to emphasize that ground campaigns do not win elections by themselves. Rather, they could give a campaign an extra point or two of turnout, if done well. Trump could well win without any ground game whatsoever. But all I’ve seen here in Wilkes-Barre suggests to me an effort that is not going well on the Republican side.
