Tamara Keith and Amy Walter on Trump’s ground game and Harris’ outreach to Republicans

NPR’s Tamara Keith and Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter join Geoff Bennett to discuss the latest political news, including the Trump campaign’s outsourcing of the ground game in key battleground states, Harris’ efforts to win over “Nikki Haley Republicans” and what else to watch for with just two weeks remaining before Election Day.
Geoff Bennett:
Elon Musk’s efforts are just one high-profile effort by Trump allies to win over voters in key battleground states.
On that and what else to watch for with just two weeks remaining before Election Day, I’m joined now by our Politics Monday duo. That’s Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report With Amy Walter and Tamara Keith of NPR.
Hello to you both.
Tamara Keith, National Public Radio:
Hello.
Geoff Bennett:
So, the Trump campaign, Tam, has outsourced some of its get-out-the-vote effort to these third-party super PACs, including Elon Musk’s.
The hitch there seems to be this reporting by Reuters that the PAC, the Elon Musk PAC, is having trouble hitting door-knocking goals and that some canvassers, according to this reporting, have lied about the numbers of voters that they actually contacted.
On a race that hinges on turnout, that seems like this could be problematic for the Trump campaign to have these outside groups doing this crucial work.
Tamara Keith:
Right. Another outside group that’s involved is Turning Point USA, run by Charlie Kirk. A lot of these people are very good at getting attention. What we don’t know is whether they’re very good at a ground game.
And the one case study that we have of a campaign saying, all right, I’m going to farm it out, we’re going to have this super PAC do it, we’re going to focus on the things that we can focus on, like ads and putting the candidate where the candidate should be, that was Ron DeSantis.
And it was a disaster. It was not a good case study in what you want to do. And so there is a very open question about whether these efforts will work or whether Elon Musk is proving himself very good at burning millions of dollars.
And we won’t really know until the election, though the other thing that I would say, the sort of counterbalance to this is that there are a lot of people who believe, including Democrats, that Donald Trump doesn’t need a ground game, because he is his own ground game. His voters are so motivated that they will crawl over glass to vote for him, and you don’t need a big door-knocking effort to get to them.
Geoff Bennett:
And that’s the lesson of 2016, that Donald Trump can win even with a decentralized or disorganized, as was the case back then, campaign.
Amy Walter, The Cook Political Report:
Right. And even 2020, the polling certainly suggested that he was not going to hit the numbers he ultimately came up with.
But the reason that we’re paying so much attention to this ground game isn’t just because the race is so close, but the kinds of voters that Trump does best with are the kinds of people who don’t show up traditionally to vote. And those people are harder to know not just who they are, but how to motivate them to get out to vote.
So, traditional door-knocking or sending, putting pieces of mail, that’s not — they don’t necessarily respond to the same messages that your voter who turns out in every single election is going to respond to. That takes a level of sophisticated targeting and messaging that you just don’t put together on the fly.
But, ultimately, do I think that, if Donald Trump loses, it’s because he outsourced his ground game? No, I don’t.
Geoff Bennett:
Meantime, the Harris campaign is going all in trying to reach out to those dissatisfied, disaffected Republicans. Unpack your reporter’s notebook for us. What are you seeing on the ground and what does it suggest about their strategy?
Tamara Keith:
So what I have seen — and I was traveling with Harris all weekend — she is making a concerted effort to speak to what you would say are Nikki Haley Republicans.
And this is an ongoing effort that includes today stops in all three of the blue wall states, doing events in suburbs specifically targeted at college-educated voters, Republicans, people who would have been Republicans if it wasn’t Trump, and trying to convince them to sort of get over whatever discomfort they have and support her.
And the reason that the campaign is putting so much effort into this, which, in theory, like in a normal year would feel kind of like a long shot or an afterthought, is that Vice President Harris, they are concerned that she may not do as well with Black voters, particularly Black men, that she may not do as well with Latino voters, that Trump is making some inroads into the traditional Democratic base, also working-class white voters.
And so what they’re trying to do is run up the numbers in the suburbs, where Trump has clearly struggled, where there are tens of thousands of people who voted for Nikki Haley after she dropped out.
Amy Walter:
Yes, and this is a perfect example.
In Chester County, which is where the campaign was today with Liz Cheney this morning, this is a place where after the Haley campaign was over, she had dropped out of the race, there was still a primary in Pennsylvania. She got about 10,000 votes in Chester County from — and, remember, Republicans can — Pennsylvania has a closed primary, so only Republicans could vote in that primary.
So, theoretically, there’s 10,000 votes for somebody, obviously the Harris campaign hoping it’s them, to pick up. And in a state that’s been decided by 60,000 votes, 80,000 votes, yes, 10,000’s nothing to sneeze at.
Geoff Bennett:
Well, look, while I have you all here, can we look at a latest poll?
Amy Walter:
Why not?
Tamara Keith:
Sure.
Geoff Bennett:
Let’s delve in. So this is the Washington — this is a Washington Post poll of likely voters in battleground states.
Doing my quick electoral math, this shows a slight Harris lead.
Tam, how is the campaign feeling about a poll like this?
Tamara Keith:
Well, I think they feel about this poll like they feel about all polls, which is the way Harris said it this weekend is, and the way she’s been saying it for a while, but it sounds like she really means it now, they — this race is close. They acknowledge it’s close. It’s going to take a lot of work to make it better than close for them.
And she has said that they are running like underdogs. She has said repeatedly that either you are running scared or you are running stupid, and they would rather run scared. Now, would they love to have better poll numbers? Yes, of course they would. But this race has been incredibly stable.
We are talking about all of these movements are within the margin of error. All of these movements are statistically not even that significant.
Geoff Bennett:
Amy, when you dig deep into these numbers and other polls that I’m sure you have access to that we mere mortals do not…
(Crosstalk)
Amy Walter:
I would share with you guys.
Geoff Bennett:
What do you see? What do you see 15 days out, a little more than two weeks away.
Amy Walter:
Yes, it is a question. I think there are two questions. One, who are these undecided voters? Overwhelmingly, they are younger. It’s a more diverse group of voters. They tend to be more heavily female.
And, on paper, those would look like Democrats, except that they are also — they also tend to be more economically sensitive and very, very worried about the economy, which is why when you see the Harris ad that is running the most, it is talking about the economy and middle-class economy and calling out Trump for being for billionaires and not being for regular people.
It’s an interesting — she obviously has a lot of different messages to a lot of different groups. But if you’re talking about who are those last bastions of swing voters, those undecided voters, the economy and being able to sell her on the economy, or at least lessen Trump’s advantage on that, they believe is really the key.
Geoff Bennett:
And, Tam, you were just with the Harris campaign in Nebraska’s Second Congressional District, just, again, to reiterate how closely and how hard-fought this election is.
Tamara Keith:
Yes, so this is known as the blue dot or the purple dot that could be the blue dot this time. And if Harris — of these swing states that we’re talking about, if Harris were to only win the blue wall of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, she would be at 269 electoral votes, one shy of what is needed to win the presidency.
And that is where Omaha comes in. And just to give a sense of the Harris campaign ground game, they have three campaign offices there. Now they’re combined campaign offices. There’s also a competitive House race there.
But they have volunteers. I was watching them phone bank. They were chasing ballots. And there’s also this kind of quirky grassroots effort that has sprung up with people putting blue dots in their yards. More than 10,000 signs have been made, many of them with blue spray paint that’s all over their hands, and then Republicans responding with some red Pac-Man things to eat the blue dot and also a big red state of Nebraska.
It is fun to see a place where they believe that their vote matters and they are incredibly politically engaged and it’s not super toxic.
Geoff Bennett:
Tamara Keith and Amy Walter, thank you both so much.
Tamara Keith:
You’re welcome.
Online on TikTok, our Lisa Desjardins and Deema Zein have been counting down to Election Day, giving us a fun and insightful fact each day.
Here’s what they have for us today.
Deema Zein:
Only 15 people have become president after being vice president.