Trump? Not so much.
As I said, we have the press underfoot at Democratic headquarters in Asheville. We’re damned good at get-out-the-vote operations. (I wrote a guide for it.) The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank came to visit and saw for himself (on a day I wasn’t at HQ):
Forty thousand volunteers have signed up since Harris became the candidate, on top of those who were already volunteering for Biden. The Harris campaign has been running four shifts of daily canvassing here — at 9 a.m., noon, 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. — in which hundreds of volunteers knock on thousands of doors. Last week, campaign volunteers knocked on more than 100,000 doors and made more than 1.8 million phone calls in North Carolina alone. Comparable efforts are underway in every swing state.
Scamming the scammer
Speaking of comparisons.
And the Trump campaign?
Well, it seems to be accomplishing a whole lot of nothing on the ground. As the Republican nominee spent a lot of the campaign hawking sneakers and trading cards to enrich himself and turning the Republican National Committee into a cult of personality, he neglected to build a field operation. At the last minute, the campaign tried to outsource the function to billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, who has poured some $75 million into an astroturf effort, paying canvassers to knock on doors and (possibly illegally) bribing people to register to vote with $1 million giveaways.
But the operation has floundered. A quarter of the door-knocks done by Musk’s paid workers are reportedly suspected of being fake in some battleground states — who knew that $20-per-hour hired guns might not be as dedicated to the cause as passionate volunteers? — and the operation has failed to meet its (relatively low) targets.
Trump-the-scammer is being scammed. Musk too, perhaps. He can land a rocket booster, but can he land a presidential campaign? Doubtful.
Democrats’ turnout machine in North Carolina is humming. Our HQ is a hive of activity, as Milbank saw for himself.
In the Democratic stronghold of Asheville in western North Carolina, I spent a couple of hours last week following Democratic volunteer Bess McDavid as she went door to door. She downloaded her assigned “turf” from the coordinated campaign (a joint operation of the Harris campaign and the state Democratic Party) into her canvassing app, “MiniVAN,” which identified those on her route who had not yet voted. She gets a call before her scheduled canvassing time from a campaign staffer to make sure she hasn’t forgotten, she walks the route ranking each voter as “Strong Harris” or something less, and at the end of the day, she gets another call from a Harris staffer to debrief her.
McDavid stopped at about 35 homes (in a neighborhood largely unscathed by the recent hurricane) during my time with her, handing out information about early voting and urging neighbors to get to the nearest polling place. Of all those who answered the door, only one said she wouldn’t be voting, and another was a Republican who had recently moved in. But the rest required no pushing:
“I’m trying to get my husband to come with me.”
They encountered more like that too. But this is Buncombe County. Of course, they did.
There’s no way to compare this year’s early vote turnout with 2020. Too many variables are different. Republicans are outvoting Democrats for the first time we’ve seen in early voting. But women are outvoting men statewide by 11 points. And those 23 percent of Republicans who voted for Nikki Haley in the NC GOP primary? What will they do? Has Hurricane Helene impacted our operations in the west? Sure. But with no pandemic, absentee-by-mail is off dramatically, as you’d expect, so it’s apples and oranges.
Do I feel good? Yes. Frankly, I feel better than I did going into Election Day 2016. And we know what happened then.
Oh, and Gov. Tim Walz was here again last night. I had a shift.