The Republican campaign for president is quietly being remade by new federal guidelines that empower big-money groups and threaten to undermine party control well beyond the 2024 election.
Former President Donald J. Trump’s team has enlisted some of these groups to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to knock on hundreds of thousands of doors across the country — saving the campaign significant money in the process.
But the Trump campaign is making a serious gamble in doing so, betting that these outside groups, which they do not directly control, can carry out their marching orders without accountability.
This transformation is a consequence of a surprise decision by the Federal Election Commissionearlier this year that allows campaigns to coordinate their canvassing efforts with outside groups like super PACs. The change means that campaigns can outsource much of their costly ground game to entities that can take unlimited donations and raise money at a much faster clip.
Senior Republican Party officials fear that the decision — and the Trump campaign’s efforts — will lead to the party losing considerable control over get-out-the-vote operations, much as they have in the world of television advertising, where the scripts and strategies are often crafted by super PACs with their own ambitions and ideas.
“We have to accept it,” said Chris Carr, who helped oversee the Trump campaign’s field operation in 2020 and has long encouraged Republicans to offload those associated costs. “Outside groups are going to do more and more of this. But the cautionary tale for donors and for everybody else is: Are they actually doing what they said they’d do?”
Brandishing clipboards, lanyards and iPads, election canvassers fan out across the country, braving Arizona heat and long drives across Pennsylvania, to identify and register their voters and then, in the fall, turn them out. Campaigns consider local volunteers ideal, but paid canvassers from out-of-state increasingly fill the gaps.
Republican campaigns and outside groups have run modest paid-canvassing operations simultaneously in the past. But they were independent of one another: A voter in Wisconsin might receive a knock at the door from the Wisconsin Republican Party and then, a few days later, from Americans for Prosperity. What is new is that for the first time those two entities can share voter targets, scripts and perhaps even office space, allowing campaigns and like-minded outside groups to work hand-in-glove in more cost-effective ways.
Donors have been drawn to these groups because they effectively can now circumvent spending limits — without losing the ability to have a say in the campaign itself, thanks to the new easing of the rules.
Republicans have seized on this change much more aggressively than have Democrats. A few weeks after the F.E.C. issued its advisory opinion, the Trump team and its lawyers invited outside groups to Mar-a-Lago to begin talks about how to coordinate responsibility for get-out-the-vote efforts, according to three people close to the campaign who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the meeting was private.
The new guidance was especially valuable for Mr. Trump, who ended the Republican primary season at a serious cash disadvantage relative to the Democrats. Outside entities could take the lead on door knocking, allowing the campaign to focus on areas where it could be more cost effective, such as television and mail.
The person in charge of coordinating the effort is James Blair, the Trump team’s political director. Mr. Blair has worked with pro-Trump paid-canvassing operations such as Turning Point Action and America First Works to execute data-sharing agreements. As new super PACs have started up in response to the ruling, Mr. Blair has sought to ensure these groups are not duplicating each other’s work.
Mr. Blair has claimed that these outside groups have more than 1,000 paid canvassers in the field and that there would likely be more than 2,500 by the time voting begins. Turning Point, which set out to raise $108 million for the effort, now has “multiple hundreds” of paid full-time staffers in each of Arizona and Wisconsin and will soon have that in Michigan said a group spokesman, Andrew Kolvet.
Another group, called Turnout for America, has been encouraging donors to contribute to its own $45 million plan to deploy 945 paid canvassers in seven battleground states, according to a memo reviewed by The New York Times. The group, led by Chris Buskirk, a close friend of Senator JD Vance, Mr. Trump’s running mate, describes its role as effectively a substitute for the campaign’s field operation itself.
“Our mission is simply to execute on the president’s ground game plan — the thought leadership is theirs,” Mr. Buskirk wrote in the memo. “The ads and the air war are theirs. The on-the-ground-muscle is ours.”
For all the cost-savings, the risks of such coordination, veterans of Republican campaigns say, are plentiful. There are opportunities for miscommunication. There is a branding issue: Voters in battleground states likely have heard of their state Republican Party, but probably not a national super PAC started a mere weeks ago. And many super PACs have never organized a canvassing operation at a scale like this, while Republican Party officials and activists have honed their practice over many election cycles.
Veteran campaign organizers are also aghast at the money that some super PACs intend to spend, skeptical that outside organizations will be able to quickly build big enough canvassing operations in a tight labor market, no matter how big the budget.
“There’s only X amount of people who are willing to go out and walk three, four, six, seven hours a day,” said Chuck Warren, who runs a canvassing operation that has worked extensively with the Republican National Committee, but is not under contract this cycle. “There’s just not a lot of people willing to do it.”
Canvassers are typically paid minimum wage or close to it, and the paid-canvassing industry is shrouded with concerns about fraudulent data. Staff turnover is constant. Mr. Warren also said there is a downside to effectively relying on mercenaries who are not as invested in the political movement — and sometimes are not even Republicans.
For example, a paid canvasser might not wait more than 15 seconds for a voter to come to the door, but a passionate volunteer would. “The sell is an engaged canvasser who’s going to talk to the voter with whatever their pitch is,” Mr. Warren said. “That’s what makes it effective.”
Control is also an issue, as critical decisions are made not by trusted aides, but by outside operatives. One outside group, America PAC, has had ambitions to spend upward of $180 million to hire thousands of paid canvassers and deploy them across the country. But the group has been plagued by drama as it seeks to follow the direction of one of its mercurial founders, Elon Musk, the owner of the social media platform X who recently endorsed Mr. Trump.
The group spent over $15 million to train and deploy canvassers who made about $500 a week in nine states — only to abruptly lay them all off after the super PAC was taken over by past aides to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. The super PAC had 200 to 250 paid staffers knocking on almost 100,000 doors a week alone in Nevada, Arizona, California and Oregon, according to a person with knowledge of the effort, the last two being solidly Democratic states that the Trump campaign likely would not have invested in.
The Trump campaign has said that it still has confidence in America PAC despite the tumult.
The Republican National Committee has insisted that it is not outsourcing its entire ground game to these outside groups. “We have paid staffers and volunteer-powered field programs in every battleground state, and they are expanding daily,” said Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign spokeswoman. Mr. Blair has said on X that Trump and the R.N.C. have “hundreds of paid staff” in battleground states with plans to hire another 100 or so. A campaign spokesman did not provide a state-by-state breakdown.
The Democratic ecosystem has not been similarly transformed, in large part because labor unions, a key part of Democratic canvassing efforts, have long been allowed to communicate to their own members and coordinate that work with campaigns, said Jon Berkon, the Democratic lawyer who pushed for the advisory opinion.
Many Republicans say they are envious of that coordination.
“The past two cycles, we have not invested in field and we’ve lost,” said Meghan Cox, who runs a conservative grass-roots firm. “Democrats invest heavy in field, and they’ve seen success. And we need to do the same or we’re going to continue to find ourselves in the same boat.”
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