Harris has small leads in most battleground states and overall nationally. These leads are within the margin of error. There are not many prospective voters who are still "gettable" and undecided. It is likely to be a matter of which candidate is more successful at getting their voters to vote. The Harris campaign controls a more traditional get-out-the-vote effort. Trump has outsourced his voter outreach efforts to outside groups.
(NY Times)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.
(CNN)“(The) ability to work with outside groups on field work alleviates the need to have the same size staff footprint as in previous cycles, allowing us to retain a greater share of resources for advertising and paid voter contact programs than in past cycles,” a senior Trump adviser told CNN.
(USA Today)Of the advantages Harris’ campaign touts is a strong war chest of $540 million and an early investment in staff and offices.
“We are in a position to play hard and aggressively across all the battlegrounds. By contrast, the Trump campaign did not do that,” said Kanninen, battleground states director of the Harris-Walz campaign.
Harris has more than 312 offices and 2,000 staffers in battleground states, according to the campaign, and made a $150 million television ad buy in August. Harris' campaign says it has $370 million in TV and digital ads reserved after Labor Day.
The Trump campaign says it has “hundreds” of paid staffers in the battleground states and nearly 400 GOP offices funded by the former president’s operation, but it didn’t specify how many of those are new and how many existed previous to the campaign.
Trump campaign political director James Blair posted on X that there are 21,000 trained “Trump Force 47 Captains,” in the battlegrounds, referencing the campaign’s volunteer program.
