The State of the Race. The View from the Front Line
The State of the Race. The View from the Front Line
The Republican Party is a hollowed out husk of what it used to be and the Trump ground game is a mirage. Trust me, I've (not) seen it (not) in action
I’M DONE with the polls. There are too many of them, they all talk over each other and they never agree about anything. If I wanted that kind of stress back in my life, I’d sign up again to coach Little League baseball. I don’t just say this to have a go at the kids, even though some of them were cheeky little shits with zero athletic talent. I was thinking more about the parents who were under the mistaken impression the whole enterprise was about them and not the little cherubs out on the field.
The polls are exactly like those parents.
“Why doesn’t my son Quinnipiac get more playing time?”
“Because I’ve got Siena, Activote, YouGov and Morning Consult on the squad and they all need some playing time, too. Besides, all of this polling is just machine pitch. It’s not like it’s the real thing.”
“YouGov? Seriously? Have you seen the cross-tabs on that kid? He couldn’t stop a grounder to shortstop if Pennsylvania’s 19 Electoral College votes depended on it.”
At least in Little League there were only 20 games a season. At this stage in the election cycle, with just under a month to go, there are at least 20 polls a day, each of them carrying the potential to upset my sunny disposition. This is why I have decided to get them out of my life and replace them with a more reliably accurate indicator of what is going on out there in election-time America. My own eyes.
My eyes are currently telling me Kamala Harris is going to win this election comfortably. I know most of the polls disagree, insisting that while she might win it will be uncomfortably close. Some even say she’s going to lose. The betting markets think so, too. But let me tell you something about the polls and the betting markets. They haven’t been where my eyes have been, out here in the heartland, driving through swing states and towns where this election will be decided, making a sharp u-turn on a suburban street when they catch a fleeting glimpse of a temporary sign on the lawn that reads Republican Party HQ.
I made one of those u-turns when I spotted the Clark County Republican Party HQ in Ohio, an adobe-style building that was once a Mexican restaurant. The car park was empty, like it usually was when I made impromptu visits to the GOP in places as geographically distant as Tucson, Arizona and Omaha, Nebraska.
At least there was someone home this time, a couple of elderly gentlemen sitting at a table in the middle of a room littered with yard signs. Cardboard Donald Trump was in the corner, thumbs up, flanked by the Stars and Stripes. Tom and Al didn’t look too happy to have company, especially when I told them I was a writer.
“How are things going?”
“What?” Al said.
Tom grimaced. ‘Al doesn’t hear too well,’’ he said. “That’s why I’m here to help him out.”
Judging by the absence of customers, things weren’t going too well. After about ten minutes a silver-haired woman came in looking for a yard sign supporting a local proposition.
“What?” Al said.
Tom got out of his seat to take care of business. “Sorry about Al,’’ he said. “He doesn’t hear too well.” He found her the yard sign she was looking for and resumed a conversation with me. I asked him about the crazy things Trump had been saying out on the campaign trail.
“To be perfectly honest, Trump wasn’t my first choice,’’ he said.
All of a sudden Al’s hearing aids kicked in.
“This interview is OVER,’’ he said.
Tom looked pained, like he’d stood on a nail. I’m a battle-hardened reporter with long experience of not being liked but even I was pretty startled.
“Do you mind if I take a couple of photographs?”
“OUT.”
I looked it up when I got back to the car. Clark County is part of Ohio’s 10th congressional district. It’s a fairly safe GOP seat in what should be a safe state for Trump. But the US Senate race is a toss-up, the kind of contest where every vote in Clark County is going to be precious, where organisation and disciplined campaigning will be key. I’m not an expert in these matters but it strikes me an angry deaf guy with a walking stick and a nice guy who doesn’t much care for Trump might not be the crack team required in this moment of high electoral stakes.
THE SAME thought occurred to me when I rocked up to Allen County HQ in Fort Wayne, Indiana, a couple of hours north. Typically, it was closed when I got there, though a pleasant young guy was waiting outside. Caleb Wakeman had just landed a job with the GOP in the next-door county. He was delivering a box of leaflets. We got chatting for a while - turned out he wasn’t much of a fan of Trump either - until a woman called Sue Richards appeared at the door and welcomed us in. She had been inside all along but had forgotten to open up at the designated time. This didn’t matter. There are bible shops in Gomorrah with more foot traffic than the Allen County Republican Party office
The three of us talked about the election. I asked how the local “Get out the vote” operation was going. Sue shrugged and got all nostalgic. “Things are different these days. It’s not like it was back in 2012 and 2016, before the pandemic. We don’t really go out and knock on doors anymore. We don’t have enough people around.”
I could bore you for hours with stories like this. In Livonia, Michigan, I tracked down the local GOP headquarters from the phone book but when I got there the doors were padlocked. “They closed down about nine months ago,’’ said a woman called Keisha who worked in the dentist's office next door. In Omaha, Nebraska, where the vital 2nd Congressional District Electoral College vote could decide the election, the local GOP office was closed. “The people in the party now are mostly MAGA. They hate their local congressman Don Bacon because he said something mean about Trump. They want him to lose so they’re not doing any campaigning.”
Meanwhile, it was standing room only at the local Democratic party office.
The difference was even more striking in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I visited both parties’ offices in the space of an hour. The GOP was closed for the day. The only evidence of activity I could see through the glass doors was a clipboard lying on a table. Across town, the Democrats’ office was buzzing with volunteers coming and going. Eight - eight! - full-time staffers were working on whatever these kinds of people do.
I dug around on Google on this subject just in case my eyes have been deceiving me but apparently they’re not. ‘Republicans are starting to raise alarms about Trump’s ground game’, ran the headline on this piece in Politico this week. Honestly, these people don’t know the half of it.
If Lara Trump, the co-chair of the Republican National Committee, was reading this (as I’m sure she is) she would say I’m whistling to keep my spirits up, that the GOP has “farmed out” its ground game operation in places like Arizona to conservative groups like Turning Point Action, a student-orientated outfit which as far as I can tell functions better as a dating forum than an election machine. In Pheonix, I watched a couple of 22-year-old guys - Area Captains, to give them their official designation - try to corral a roomful of elderly cranks who had only shown up for the free pizza into something called Trump Force 47. I honestly felt sorry for those two kids and, believe me, it takes a lot of effort to feel sorry for a young Nazi.
So, sorry Lara, I’m not buying it. To misquote my dear departed mother, I wouldn’t send Turning Point Action to the shops for a loaf of bread, never mind ask them to win me a swing state in a Presidential election.
It could be that none of the above matters, that the enthusiasm for Trump has been under-estimated as it was in 2016 and that his supporters will come out in such numbers that organsiation - or lack thereof - will have counted for nothing. More staggeringly, my lying eyes will have failed me again. I note today that the Harris campaign passed the $1 billion in campaign contributions raised. If she loses and you were one of the people who chipped in a few bucks her help out be sure to ask for your money back. You can use it to buy a one-way ticket to Canada, anywhere to escape the reach of Turning Point Action, or as it will be known once Lara starts farming out the functions of government under the new regime - the FBI.
I only have my hyper-local perspective here in my part of Michigan to go off of, but I’m one of five Democratic precinct delegates that got elected for my precinct this year. On the ballot, there were no PDs for Republicans. We’re actively handing out voter guides to Democratic voters and helping to organize them. I don’t know what The Republicans are doing. It’s weird.
Lara trump was put there to clean out the R’d of their party and their money Its all siphoned off to Trump Of vourse there is no ground game or anything its all a grift all of it everything Down to the last nail