Status Report: The State of the Campaigns

Things are in flux with the polls, money and ground games of the two campaigns.

There’s news about the campaigns to report as we head into summer: some good, some bad and some just plain weird.

Here’s the good news. Several major polls are showing that Joe Biden has gained ground against Donald Trump, and in some cases, notably the Fox poll, is leading him. But wait, I thought you said polls don’t matter! Why are you talking about polls? I’ll explain in more detail below.

Now the bad news. That big cash advantage that Biden had going into the second quarter? It’s all but evaporated, for three reasons I’ll flesh out as well.

And finally, the weird news. While Biden is running a strong ground game, Trump appears to be outsourcing that job to an outside organization: Turning Point USA. It’s a risky and untested strategy, and it could backfire badly come Election Day.

It’s instructive to break these developments down a bit more.

Recent polls have Trump fuming. Especially the Fox one.

As Democratic strategist and data cruncher Simon Rosenberg noted in his column yesterday, five major polls have all shown a shift toward Joe Biden lately. Writes Rosenberg,

[H]eads are exploding all over MAGA land today. As I’ve been writing over the past few weeks, there are now many serious, credible polls showing recent movement to Biden….

• Fox News 3 pt Biden gain (7 pts since March) 

• Echelon 4 pt Biden gain (prominent GOP pollster)

• CBS/YouGov 3 pt Biden gain 

• Morning Consult 2 pt Biden gain 

• Yahoo/YouGov 2 pt Biden gain 

• NYT 2 pt Biden gain

The Fox poll is particularly delicious for your Schadenfriday. Here’s a video summary of the commentary on that network from the first hour after that poll broke:

In case you need a chaser to that first shot, here is Trump melting down over the results.

And here’s how that Fox poll has looked over time:

If you’re a regular reader of my column, you know that I have a big problem with how modern polling is conducted, and an even bigger problem with the way the results are misreported, misinterpreted and even weaponized. So please do not look at the above and assume that the race is anything but close. Everything we know about 2020 and the state of our country tells us that this is essentially a tied race. And no, the polls are no more accurate today than they were before they showed Biden was leading.

But I will say this: Even assuming polls have inherently flawed methodologies and cannot predict with any reliable accuracy the actual winner of the election, movement within a poll over time can show some general direction sentiment. And movement within many polls the same way at least tells a consistent story: Biden presently has the momentum.

Think of a poll as a thermometer that is broken and can’t accurately tell you the temperature inside your oven, and therefore you can’t really know if your cake is well and truly baked until you pull it out to see. But that same faulty thermometer can sometimes tell you if your oven actually got any hotter when you adjusted the dial. It just can’t really tell you by how much.

But big money comes in for Trump…

If you’re the Trump Campaign and unhappy about the recent polls, there is some good news to help offset that pain. And it comes in the form of money.

The huge cash advantage that the Biden Campaign had going into April—about a $100 million edge—is now gone. And there are some big reasons for this.

First, the news of Trump’s criminal conviction by a Manhattan jury created a fundraising bonanza for his campaign. According to the Trump Campaign, donations were pouring in so fast that the WinRed server crashed for a time. According to what the Trump Campaign told the New York Times, following the guilty verdicts around $70 million in donations came in within the first 48 hours. While it’s right to be skeptical about anything the ex-president or his campaign says, this number isn’t surprising given that the campaign raised even more than that when he was first indicted back in early 2023.

Second, the Biden Campaign has already spent massively on television advertising and ground game infrastructure, while the Trump Campaign has not yet begun its blitz of battleground state advertisements. That means the Biden Campaign has been drawing down its cash advantage, spending $35.4 million on advertising in the top six battleground states, while the Trump Campaign has kept much of its powder dry, spending basically nothing on TV ads from the beginning of this year until now.

That’s about to change, however. According to the Times, 

this week, MAGA Inc. began reserving nearly $30 million in airtime starting in early July in Pennsylvania and Georgia, as part of what it has said will be a $100 million summer advertising blitz.

That figure is impressive, but it remains well below the $250 million figure that the Democratic Super PAC “Future Forward” has touted for its battleground advertising campaign following the conclusion of the party’s nominations.

Finally, the Trump Campaign received a shot in the arm from a reclusive heir to billions of family money named Timothy Mellon, who gave a whopping $50 million to Trump’s Super PAC. Mellon, by the way, is also the single biggest donor to RFK, Jr., if there was ever any doubt about what role Kennedy was meant to play in this race. 

From where I sit, it looks likely that the Trump Campaign will close the gap between the two camps. But one thing it cannot do is make up for lost time in spending that money to build critical election infrastructure. And that’s where the weird news comes in.

Trump turns to untested third parties for his ground game

While the Biden Campaign is running a traditional and highly disciplined ground game focused on the battlegrounds, having just hired its 1,000 staffer this week across 200 campaign offices, the Trump campaign doesn’t seem interested in going toe-to-toe directly.

Instead, the Trump Campaign is bent on outsourcing its ground game operation to third parties such as Turning Point USA. As Mark Caputo discussed in his assessment of this strategy, 

[S]ince May, [Trump’s] campaign has quietly been in talks with more than three dozen conservative groups to outsource parts of its voter turnout operation. This would be a first-of-its-kind effort.

Cost: $100 million, at least.

Total paid canvassers: 3,000, at least.

The Trump Campaign ironically can do this because of a ruling by the FEC back in March—one that was sought and obtained by Democratic operatives, including lawyer Marc Elias’s firm. That advisory opinion opened the door to campaigns outsourcing their ground games to third parties in a way that wasn’t allowed before.

While this seems to throw a lifeline to Trump, it isn’t as easy as just handing a bunch of money to organizations and telling them to go and get out the vote. Many of these conservative organizations don’t have much experience with this kind of work. As Jon Berkon of the Elias Law Group argued,

“You need an organizational structure—whether it’s the party, candidate, or outside groups—to make this work. You need offices, you need a management structure, you need policies, you need detailed protocols for how to collect data and prevent people from goofing off on the job. It is really hard, labor-intensive work. 

And if you haven’t built that infrastructure year, over year, over year, it ain’t gonna work. You can spend all the money that you want, but the question is, ‘Are you actually getting quality contacts with voters at the door?’ If you throw a bunch of money at it, you would probably increase the volume but are you actually doing anything that is effective or useful for you?”

Biden’s battleground states director, Dan Kanninen, agreed that without an existing campaign infrastructure, third party coordination doesn’t make much sense:

“I’m not sure what it looks like to coordinate with a candidate that has no campaign. When you drop late money into a race, it’s like shrapnel bouncing off of satellites. Our campaign has been on the ground in communities for months building relationships and trust and doing it consistently over time. If Donald Trump and his campaign think they can parachute in with outside money in the 11th hour after having built no campaign apparatus, they just don’t understand how this works.”

We’ll learn in the fall whether the Trump Campaign strategy of having “coordinators” for all the canvassers organized and paid by these right-wing groups will work. It’s an incredibly risky strategy that could fail because of lack of experience, technology and organization. If battleground states are a war, then unit discipline will matter a great deal.

I have my doubts about this Trumpian strategy. One fun fact pointed out by Caputo cites the GOP experience in 2022:

[P]aid canvassers in Las Vegas were supposed to be knocking on doors but instead were discovered gambling eight miles away at Caesar’s Palace casino, according to an NBC News report that detailed multiple Republican ground-game problems in Nevada and Georgia.

Thoughts and prayers to the Trump Campaign.