Enthusiasm, Efficient Operation Driving GOP Turnout Advantage

Republican National Committee officials and GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s deputy campaign manager said Friday that their unorthodox joint field operation is paying dividends, cutting into the Democrats’ traditional advantage in early voting.

Trump decided early in the cycle, when he largely was self-funding his campaign, that he essentially would outsource to the national party the get-out-the-vote (GOTV) logistics normally shared by the campaign and party apparatus.

“The Trump campaign and the RNC have been working very closely together in every aspect of voter targeting and turnout.”

“The Trump campaign and the RNC have been working very closely together in every aspect of voter targeting and turnout,” deputy campaign manager David Bossie said Friday in a conference call with reporters. “And there has been no daylight between the Trump campaign and the RNC. We have been an incredible team working together. I’m really happy to see the results of this.”

Bossie said the massive early commitment the RNC made in building up its data and digital operations has caused the Democrats to be “taken down a notch” in early voting.

RNC Political Director Chris Carr said party volunteers already have knocked on about 12 million doors — compared with 11.5 million in all of 2012.

More than half of those door knocks have taken place since the start of early voting, Carr said. He said it has shown up in early balloting:

• Although Republicans trail early voting in Arizona, RNC officials are encouraged that in the biggest county, Maricopa, 225,000 Republicans have voted early, compared with 186,000 Democrats.
• After the first four days of early voting in Florida, votes cast by Republicans trail Democrats by 38,000. After a comparable period in 2012, that deficit was 115,000 votes. Republicans are outperforming their 2012 early voting numbers at this stage by 10 percent, while Democrats are down 8 percent.
• The share of early and absentee votes cast by Republicans in Iowa is up 1.2 percent over the comparable period in 2012, while Democrats have seen a 1.4 percent decline. For the first time during this campaign, Republicans won early voting in Iowa on Thursday.
• In North Carolina, 41 percent of all absentee ballots returned so far are from registered Republicans, compared with 33 percent from Democrats. On Thursday, 150 new early voting locations opened in the state, and both parties improved over their 2012 pace. Democrats had 99,046 voters, compared with 75,821 Republicans. The 23,225 difference was much smaller than the 50,977 same-day deficit in 2012.
• At this point in 2012, Republican voters lagged Democrats in Ohio by about 114,000. So far this year, the deficit is almost half of that. Jon Black, the RNC’s director of turnout and targeting, said many Republican counties in the state are overperforming their 2012 numbers, while Democratic counties are running behind in early voting.

Trump’s decision to rely so heavily on the party for functions that presidential campaigns normally handle directly has drawn skepticism from some political observers. That skepticism has intensified due to Democrat Hillary Clinton’s sizable campaign fundraising. She currently sits on a pile of cash nearly twice as large as Trump’s war chest.

Bossie said the campaign will overcome that obstacle with a mix of smarter spending and greater voter enthusiasm.

“We are being incredibly efficient with the dollars that we have,” he said.

Bossie said “incredible voter intensity,” as reflected by the size of Trump’s mammoth rallies, will be a wild card when it comes to turnout.

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“That is what I think is going to carry us over the finish line,” he said. “That is the under-polling that we talk about.”

Carr said the RNC ran a full simulation a year ago this month to model what voter contact efforts would look like.

“We started preparing for the general election literally over a year ago,” he said.

Carr said the party started hiring state directors in summer 2015 — long before it was apparent who the nominee would be. Typically, state directors have not come aboard until the spring of an election year.

Carr said the party now has 3,100 field staff across the country. Including volunteers, there are 7,315 trained organizers, he said. He pointed to the Republican Leadership Initiative, which trains volunteers to drive voter turnout.

“They are volunteer, but a lot of these guys give close to full-time hours,” he said. “Some of them are giving full time and more.”