We are now less than 48 hours away from the first returns of the 2024 election, and with the clock ticking, it’s clear that the campaign of former president Donald Trump is flailing, falling in the polls, and increasingly self-destructing in public as their candidate alienates more voters with every speech he gives.
But will it be optics that decide who is the 47th president of the United States, or could it come down to something much simpler?
As Bill Scher notes in an article he wrote for Washington Monthly, the way you win elections is with turnout. You get your voters to the polls in larger numbers than your opponent. And that requires a ground game of people making phone calls, knocking on doors, and making sure voters get to the polls or cast an absentee ballot.
For the Trump team, that’s the problem: Their ground game sucks.
“Over the past three months, several media outlets have filed reports on how well Trump’s unorthodox turnout army is performing. Most suggest it’s a five-alarm dumpster fire. “
The Harris team, on the other hand, is running like a well-oiled machine, and getting its voters to the polls in record numbers, as the early vote totals show.
“In mid-October, The New York Times examined the Harris and Trump turnout machines in several battleground areas. In Pennsylvania’s closely divided Erie County, reporters found debilitating infighting among Republican insiders and outside activists. In Kenosha, Wisconsin, Democrats had out-door-knocked Republicans by more than 8-to-1. In Arizona, neither Turning Point, America PAC, nor the Trump campaign would share updated information on how many houses they had contacted.”
Meanwhile, the Trump machine seems to be operating on the principles of grift and lies, which is ironic when you consider Donald has made a career out of those two vices.
“In Michigan, canvassers and paid door knockers for the former president, contracted by a firm associated with America PAC, have been subjected to poor working conditions: A number of them have been driven around in the back of a seatless U-Haul van, according to video obtained by WIRED, and threatened that their lodging at a local motel wouldn’t be paid for if they didn’t meet canvassing quotas. One door knocker alleges that they didn’t even know they were signing up for anything having to do with Musk or Trump.”
So what happened? Scher believes it was Trump’s mistaken belief that all he needed to do was appeal to his fanatical base supporters, ignoring the fact that he also needed crossover voters to win nationally because his core support has never gone beyond 47%, and that won’t put him in the White House.
“Why would Trump gamble the election on these untested rogues? In June, I surmised that a strategy based on juicing the base and ignoring the swing appealed to his innate narcissism because the latter would require rhetorical modulation or message discipline. Doing things the old-fashioned RNC way—with door-knocking efficiently concentrated in more densely populated areas where more swing voters live—meant behaving like a responsible adult. Following Kirk’s strategy of digging up stray MAGA voters in far-flung places allowed Trump to indulge in his darkest impulses.”
All of this suggests that it should come as no surprise to anyone (including the Trump camp) when Kamala Harris wins in a landslide.
