Building A Better Ground Game Was Critical To Trump’s Victory

If you want to win the war, you’d better have a good ground game. 

It’s taken Republicans a long time to learn that basic truth on the battleground of politics, often through painful losses. But some grassroots conservative groups got it in the latest election cycle, and the armies they deployed in ballot-chasing battles across the seven battleground states appear to have had a pronounced impact on the outcome of this month’s presidential election. 

Taking a page from the successful ground game playbook in Florida’s successful 2022 elections, American Majority Action (AMA) developed and launched a blanketing ballot-chasing initiative in four swing states — Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin. The conservative grassroots nonprofit targeted low-to-moderate propensity voters, conservatives who rarely or never vote in elections, encouraging and cajoling them to not only to vote, but to vote early. 

Put More Fish in the Pond

Through millions of contacts and sustained relationship building, AMA helped cut the massive absentee ballot/early voting surpluses Democrats and leftist activists have built up in past elections cycles in Wisconsin, while giving Republicans a decided ballot advantage heading into Election Day in Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina. 

In the end, former President Donald Trump won all seven battleground states, reversing narrow losses suffered in 2020 in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. And the GOP presidential nominee won North Carolina by more than 3 percentage points, more than doubling his margin of victory from 2020.  While the Republican Senate candidates in Arizona, Nevada, and Wisconsin didn’t come out victorious, the data show that in Wisconsin in particular challenger Eric Hovde benefited from a boost in lower-participation conservative voters. The Madison Republican businessman came within less than 30,000 votes of beating far-left incumbent Sen. Tammy Baldwin in what turned out by far to be Baldwin’s narrowest election victory. 

“It really was a game changer to be able to participate earlier. You just set yourself up much better to win on the Election Day vote,” Matt Batzel, executive director of American Majority Action, told me Thursday on the “Vicki McKenna Show” in Milwaukee. 

Like a good Wisconsinite would, Batzel compared the ballot chase to fishing — stocking the pond. 

“If you want to catch more fish or win an election, you’ve got to put more fish in the pond,” he said. “You’ve got to first of all generate more absentee ballots, you’ve got to get your less likely voters to participate.”

But getting out the lower-participation voter and getting them out earlier takes time, money and plenty of persistence. That’s what it took in Florida to turn a blue state red, and that exactly what American Majority Action’s founder could see was needed on a broader scale to win in 2024 after humbling losses in 2022. 

‘Export’ the Florida Model 

After picking himself up off the floor in the red wave-less midterm elections, American Majority CEO Ned Ryun said he had an epiphany. He said he wished he would have had said epiphany early in 2022 when it might have helped salvage a disappointing election cycle, but better late than never. 

“We need to export the Florida GOP’s absentee-ballot chase program into these key battleground states in 2024,” Ryun told The Federalist in late September.

Once a critical swing state, Florida is now a reliable red. The great exodus of Americans from lockdown states to free state Florida during Covid may explain some of the political shift in recent years. There are a number of drivers, but the fact remains that this election cycle registered Republicans outpaced registered Democrats for the first time in Sunshine State history. 

And it’s not even close. 

“Florida has 1 million more Republican registered voters than Democrats, elections officials revealed, further cementing its status as a conservative hotbed,” the Associated Press, Pravda Press central, lamented in August. 

The Republican registration rolls have been building for several years, but Florida turned firetruck red in 2022 when Gov. Ron DeSantis kicked the stuffing out of RINO-turned-independent-turned-Democrat Charlie Crist — Florida’s governor a long time ago. 

“An hour after polls closed in most of Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ reelection was guaranteed,” the Tampa Bay Times reported in a what happened to Florida Democrats? story.  

“By the end of the night, his margin would only grow, carrying the state by 19 points ahead of his Democratic challenger and former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist. In a sweeping victory, DeSantis also flipped reliable blue counties like Miami-Dade and Palm Beach,” the piece noted. 

Consultant Shannon Love told the publication there’s “no secret” to the Republicans’ success.

“They do the work. I think that Democrats get caught up in the message and the polls instead of doing the consistent work,” Love said. 

‘Super Voters’

Ryun was impressed with the Florida GOP ground game, which was focused on generating more absentee ballots among lower-participation voters and then making sure that no less than 80 percent of those ballots came back. That appears to be the magic number, Ryun said, between winning and losing. Anything under an 80 percent return rate makes it much more difficult to take a race, he said.

“I went to donors in January 2023 and said we need to do this in key battleground states in 2023. We need to generate more ballots among mid-to-low props (propensity), because we know that if you take a mid-to-low propensity voter and get them to request a ballot, 80 percent of the time they’re going to vote in the next election,” Ryun said. “So you turn them into kind of super voters, create that bigger ballot universe and then we put pieces in place for a robust ballot chase.”

The conservative activist described it as “a series of targeted harassments.” The ballot-chasing campaign includes door knocks, phone calls, texts, postcards, digital messaging and more— all to continuously remind would-be voters to go get their ballots. Done right, the effort significantly narrows the absentee and early ballot leads Democrats traditionally post. 

“So that coming into Election Day, where traditionally Republicans absolutely annihilate Democrats [in turnout], Donald Trump crushes on Election Day and wins reelection by winning most of these, if not all of these, seven key states,” Ryun said a little more than a month before the general election. 

That’s exactly what happened. 

‘Three Times Better Position’

In Wisconsin, Trump came into Election Day down about 200,000 votes in the early ballot chase, according to AMA’s numbers based on Marquette Law School Poll voting data of absentee and early in-person voting. That may seem like a lot of ground to make up, Batzel said. But compare Trump’s 2024 deficit to the 600,000-plus early-vote ballot advantage Democrat Joe Biden held over Trump in Wisconsin in the 2020 presidential election, a shortfall the president could not quite overcome. 

“So to be in three times better position, a three times smaller lead for Democrats heading into Election Day, and we know we’re going to win [turnout on] Election Day, that was such a big indicator that we were in a good position,” Batzel said. 

In Nevada, AMA’s 300 ballot chasers focused on the Silver State’s largest county, Clark County, home to Las Vegas. In a state with universal vote-by-mail, the voter participation drive helped Republicans secure a lead of more than 43,000 votes going into Election Day, according to AMA’s data. The effort, the organization reports, also was a significant factor in Republicans winning all 14 days of early in-person voting. 

In North Carolina, Republicans cast more early ballots than Democrats for the first time. American Majority estimates that as many as 50,000 absentee ballots were directly generated by the project’s outreach efforts.

And AMA says it assembled a network of more than 500 volunteers for door knocking, phone banking, and text outreach in Arizona. Based on AMA’s  review, Trump entered Election Day up by north of 130,000 votes, bolstering confidence that “leans-red” Arizona would be counted in Trump’s column. 

The four-state effort took millions of door knocks, phone calls, texts and reminder postcards, according to AMA.  

One Key Player

As The Federalist reported earlier this month, the Sentinel Action Fund and its partners experienced similar successes with its ballot-chasing campaign in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Montana. Sentinel, too, targeted and turned out hundreds of thousands of mid-to-low propensity voters to cast ballots early, cutting deeply into Democrat absentee ballot/early voting leaders. 

The super PAC, led by conservative grassroots activist Jessica Anderson and supported by Tennessee Republican Sen. Bill Hagerty, is credited for helping to deliver the comfortable majority that Republicans will hold in the Senate next session. Republican challengers in all three states defeated incumbent Democrats, giving the GOP 53 seats beginning in January. 

Anderson and Ryun agreed the ballot-chasing efforts would not have been nearly as successful without the buy-in of one key player.  

Going after early votes among conservatives is a tough sell in the best of times. Following the rigged 2020 election in which liberals used Covid to harvest a bumper crop of early and mail-in votes, Republicans were understandably jaded on pre-Election Day voting. 

Anderson and Ryun agreed their ballot-chasing efforts would not have been nearly as successful without the buy-in of one key player: Donald Trump. They gave credit to Susie Wiles, co-chair of Trump’s campaign, and James Blair, the campaign’s political director, for convincing the now president-elect to put his loathing of mail-in ballots aside and beat Democrats at their own game. 

‘People Thought We Were Crazy’

There’s a good deal of vindication here for the conservative ballot chasers. In the closing weeks of the election, a narrative had emerged in the corporate media about the Trump campaign’s “paltry” ground game. Despite the grousing by some in the GOP, outside groups, including political action committees like the Sentinel Action Fund, American Majority, and Turning Point Action were working to match Democrats at their own game.

Last month, The Associated Press reported that it had “obtained an unvarnished look at how Turning Point is promoting its strategy” via recordings of the conservative group’s presentations to “state and local Republican officials.” The AP piece asserted that the Trump campaign’s decision to rely on “untested groups” to chase ballots was drawing criticism from some Republican strategists. 

“Their strategy is bad. They know how to talk MAGA, they know how to message the base,” Tyler Montague, a Republican strategist from Arizona and a “longtime Turning Point critic,” reportedly told the accomplice news outlet. “But they literally don’t know what to say to a swing voter. They alienate these people.”

Andrew Kolvet, spokesman for Turning Point’s Chase the Vote Initiative, “rebuffed such criticism,” according to the AP. 

“We did this because we knew conservatives need” a get-out-the-vote strategy, he reportedly said.

The Republican National Committee disagreed with the assessments of what one national party leader saw as sour grapes strategists.

“Republican strategists complaining about the ground game are doing so because they are not involved,” an RNC official told The Federalist on background at the time.

He praised the efforts of the various players for delivering “the most robust and comprehensive ground game” he’s seen in 15 years.

“People thought we were crazy. Why would we waste all this time and effort on people who don’t vote? We said, ‘If we give them more than the time of day they will come out and vote for us,’” the RNC official said. 

The campaign wasn’t about identity. Everybody knows Trump. Everyone knows Biden and, by extension and the Democratic National Committee’s soft coup, Kamala Harris. RNC officials knew they had high-propensity voters in the bank. The difference makers would be the frustrated lower-participation voters looking to get back into the game  — with a nudge or two. 

And then it was about tailoring the messaging to those voters.

“If you saw the early vote numbers in places like Virginia, red strongholds in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, some of these lines were hours and hours long. Those were our low props, our low-propensity voters,” the RNC official said. 

About 1:30 a.m. on Election Night, the doubters disappeared, he said. 

“You didn’t hear another peep out of them. In fact, we haven’t heard from them since,” the source said. 

‘Stock the Pond’

Ryun said 2024 showed the value of targeting low-participation voters to vote early. Now, he said, the trick is to keep them engaged. 

“We’ve got to figure out how to take Trump early voters and turn them into more active and consistent voters for anyone on the ticket,” he said. “If we don’t, we’ll lose tens of thousands of them in the elections ahead.” 

Batzel said conservatives can build on the success, but it starts with learning the lessons. The most important lesson, he said, is that a good ground game is about face-to-face communications and constant contact. 

“We can continue to learn lessons, improve the system, get more groups to buy in and get involved, especially in absentee ballot generation, not just chasing,” AMA’s executive director said. “You have to generate. You have to stock the pond with more fish, and we have the opportunity to do that this spring [Wisconsin Supreme Court election] and for election cycles to come.” 

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.