TPM is doing really good work covering the Republican ground effort and @joshtpm.bsky.social is being appropriately cautious, but a few things stick out to me (even though my ground game work is well past me).
First, there is no clear idea what is going on. What sticks out to me in the stories is that those who are on the inside have different cases they are making which suggests to me this isn’t an effort with clear goals or even theory of the case. That matters because you are running a highly decentralized operation and keeping it on mission requires a consistent message and implementation.
Second, the evidence for the case is the Iowa primary. Marginal caucus attendees are nothing like marginal general election voters. It’s so true, it’s hard to even know where to start. Marginal voters in a general election are the most marginal voters out there–if they aren’t going to vote in the Presidential, they aren’t voting for anything else (sure exceptions, but they will prove the rule). Marginal caucus attendees are people who at least identify with the party and probably vote in every national election if not almost all local elections.
Third, when you get down to marginal voters in the general you are running into people who may not be registered, who may not be able to vote if they have a criminal conviction, may have moved, or are just generally paranoid about people showing up at their door–especially for those who are Trumpy (work a Census and you know these folks). The barriers to voting are more than just showing up is the point here. In a state like Minnesota this is lessened because of same day registration, but that’s not true in several of these states. Some of these states are also deactivating the voters who fall in this category (irony alert).
Even as financial triage this makes little sense. Good field work does several things–identifies those you want to activate, find volunteers, increase visibility, identify those you do not want to activate, and persuade (this isn’t exhaustive). The Trump campaign and the SuperPacs are apparently going after the hardest to reach voters with their limited money. Think about that–it’s just that dumb. I want to be clear that reaching out to such voters in itself is not bad and a solid campaign could do both, but if a campaign wants to maximize votes, it needs to track your supporters to target them to actually get out to vote and this effort gives the campaign only data on the most marginal people who are most likely to vote on election day so you are spending all that time on them and you won’t even bank any votes.
The notion that the suburbs are maxed out is silly for this very reason–if they are maxed out it is because the political canvassing does it and if read Josh’s post he makes a great point in the last paragraph how these aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, it would be a good idea to run a kind of Trump effort on top of a more traditional operation if you could, but choosing the Trump target of very marginal voters is the worst choice in a world of scarcity.