GOP's 2024 'ground game' in limbo after Trump's MAGA coup: report
The Republican National Committee was all set to open 40 field offices in key states for the 2024 presidential election — then former President Donald Trump ousted longtime party chair Ronna McDaniel and replaced her leadership team with a group of loyalists, including his own daughter-in-law Lara Trump. And now, plans to ramp up the GOP's ground operation seem to have stalled, reported The Dispatch.
"Roughly six weeks later, neither the committee nor the Trump campaign has much infrastructure or personnel in the swing states that will decide the November 5 election, multiple sources in Washington and the crucial battleground states told Dispatch Politics this week," reported David M. Drucker, Charles Hilu, and Michael Warren. "That means few if any regional and local campaign headquarters; little to no deployed field staff; and little to no traditional voter turnout activities, such as door-knocking, phone banking, or volunteer organizing. Even after the Trump-led RNC’s reimagined field program eventually emerges, their strategy is to concentrate almost exclusively on the half-dozen states that will determine Trump’s fate. Republicans elsewhere? They’re on their own."
One longtime GOP operative said, “The RNC was aggressively staffing up in 10-plus states and it was put on hold ... The new regime is moving quickly to get the field operation going but I expect it to be narrowly focused on presidential battleground states, as opposed to expanding operations in states like California and New York, where there are a lot of House seats in play.”
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"The decision to jettison McDaniel’s preparations for a robust ground game that was similar in scope and strategy to the RNC’s efforts to boost Trump in 2016 and 2020 appears to have originated at the top," said the report. "Trump repeatedly told McDaniel in conversations before he pushed her out of the chairmanship that he did not need the RNC to focus on 'get-out-the-vote' activities. Rather, knowledgeable Republican sources told us, the former president informed McDaniel he wanted the committee to prioritize 'election integrity' efforts."
Lara Trump has moved ahead with gusto on this mission, although she recently invited confusion and mockery with her claim that the RNC is moving ahead with election litigation in "81 states."
This comes on top of a number of other controversies with how the new leadership of the GOP has prepared for the 2024 election, which is coinciding with a significant cash disadvantage against Democrats.
Earlier, the new RNC leadership drew fire for a decision to defund minority community outreach centers, which was subsequently walked back. They have also triggered a mass exodus of some veteran staffers by imposing a loyalty test that included asking whether staffers agreed with Trump's conspiracy theories about the 2020 election being stolen.