This was Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I was looking for the ground game. Have you heard about it? The campaign says it’s the greatest ground game to ever exist, that while you don’t see enthusiasm for the president reflected in the rigged polls, you do see it when you talk to his real supporters where they live in Real America. In fact, they talk about surveys of enthusiasm not just as though they are more reliable than real polls but as though they are the polls — as though the traditional kind simply don’t exist, or matter. I drove across the country last month, and I saw only two signs for Joe Biden the entire way. Is this meaningful? The Trump campaign is hoping that it is. In Pennsylvania, they’re making calls and knocking on doors — a million a week — powered by more than 1.4 million volunteers. Pennsylvania is uniquely important. Rural voters won the state for Trump by less than one percentage point in the last election. This time, Trump is behind Biden by a lot. To close the gap, the campaign says it’s hosting dozens of events here — more than in any other state. But good luck finding them.
It was 7 p.m. on July 23, and Team Trump had scheduled a training session for campaign volunteers in the area. Before I arrived, I had worried about my exposure to the virus. I imagined a scene that was part local political-party headquarters and part anti-quarantine protest. I imagined a lot of Trump supporters, maskless and seated close together, breathing heavily on a reporter leaning in to record their comments. But the office was quiet. I walked through the arch of books by right-wing personalities (Bill O’Reilly, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh) and past the portraits (George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan) and maps of Pennsylvania voting precincts. I didn’t see anyone there.
In a blue room in the back, beneath an American flag with the words MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN printed in block letters inside the white stripes, a woman sat alone at the end of a conference table. She wasn’t participating in the volunteer training. She was the volunteer training. There just weren’t any volunteers.
When she first thought I might be one, she was friendly. She offered me coffee and asked me to sit down. Two people had signed up for the Trump Leadership Initiative training, she said, but each of them had canceled, one citing an ear infection and the other citing allergies. When she learned I was a member of the media, her face hardened. She returned her gaze to her computer and told me she wasn’t permitted to speak to the press.
Fifty miles away, at the GOP headquarters in Lancaster, another event was scheduled for 6 p.m. the next night. When I arrived, the local field director, Jason, was talking to an elderly man. “I appreciate all your support, sir,” he said. “Oh, absolutely. I think this election is more important than 1864. Then, we would’ve lost half the country. This time? We could lose the whole country.” Nick, the Trump-Pence regional field director, asked me if I was there for the food drive — which was part of the campaign’s “Latino outreach effort,” he said — or the volunteer training. The elderly man had made his way out the door, and now there was nobody left in the office besides the two men who worked there. “There’s pretty light turnout,” Nick said. But not to worry, as things were “going really well,” Jason said.
A few days later, on July 30, the campaign scheduled two voter-contact training sessions at Convive Coffee Roastery on Providence Boulevard in Pittsburgh. The evening session was supposed to start at 7 p.m., but when I arrived, early, at 5:30, the shop had already been closed for half an hour. A girl cleaning up inside came out to talk to me (even when it’s open, like many such establishments, the pandemic rules are takeout only). She said she had no idea that any campaign had scheduled any kind of meeting at the place where she worked for two hours after closing time. But she hadn’t worked the morning shift that day, when the first event was scheduled, so she texted a co-worker who had. He told her a few people came into the shop and asked about a Trump-campaign meetup but that he didn’t know what they were talking about and couldn’t help them. “I don’t know if they figured it out or not,” she said.
I hung around for another hour waiting until eight to see if anyone showed. Nobody did.
A ten-minute drive away, at the second-floor county Republican committee office, some staffers — two young women and two youngish men — sat peering at their laptops, an enormous portrait of a scowling Trump behind them.
“What event?,” Kevin Tatulyan, an Allegheny County Republican official, asked as he waved me into the room.
“What event?,” Dallas McClintock, the regional Trump-Pence field director, asked.
One of the women, with lilac-colored hair, whipped her head toward McClintock.
“It’s your email here!” she told him, pointing to the advertisement I’d mentioned.
“My email?,” McClintock said in disbelief.
“Yeah!” she said.
He scrunched up his face.
For the next several minutes, the staffers tried to sort out how, with fewer than 100 days until the election, they had unknowingly advertised official campaign events that didn’t exist to potential campaign volunteers in the most important swing state in the country.
They squinted at their screens and asked questions.
“What time?”
“Where did you learn about it?”
“What was the address?”
The second event had been listed with an apparent misspelling in the street name, a detail that prompted the girl with the lilac hair to laugh.
“Sounds right,” she said dryly.
“I’m sorry!” the other woman said, and she seemed to mean it. “If you want to leave us your card, we can make sure to invite you to our events in the future!”
Trump said on Monday that the only way he can lose the election is if the Democrats rig it.