Republicans took advantage of a Federal Election Commission decision earlier this year that grants campaigns the ability to coordinate with outside political action committees on paid canvassing, a strategy that was largely disjoined from more traditional methods run by the Republican National Committee and state parties.

As a result, President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign left many of the turn-out-the-vote operations to outside groups like Elon Musk’s America PAC, Turning Point Action, America First Works, and others. However, since the groups often were operating in different regions with separate goals, it led some Republicans to believe down-ballot GOP candidates ended up being collateral damage.

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“Look at Michigan, Wisconsin, and, as the count stands now, Nevada. The commonality in those states: Trump won them but the Senate nominee in all those states lost,” said Dennis Lennox, a Republican strategist based in Michigan.

“A tremendous number of so-called low propensity voters — the major target this cycle — showed up to vote for Donald J. Trump and then dropped off, not completing their ballot,” he added. “In Michigan, over 100,000 Trump voters didn’t vote for the Republican Senate nominee. On the other side, just 16,000 Harris voters dropped off. Looking back to 2020, only 7,619 Trump voters didn’t vote for the Senate nominee that year. The big differences? The ground staff and get-out-the-vote was outsourced.”

Despite this, Turning Point Action, headquartered in Phoenix, is taking a victory lap after seeing the large margins Trump is leading by in Arizona after the state in 2020 went for Biden by less than 11,000 votes. They also operated state-wide in Wisconsin, where Trump secured 49.8% of the vote compared to 48.8% for Vice President Kamala Harris, according to the Associated Press.

As the Grand Canyon State continues to count the votes, TPA Founder, Charlie Kirk said the results are already proving their methods were effective, turning out an estimated 200,000 low-propensity voters so far.

“We still have one-third of ballots to count [in Arizona], without our efforts in Wisconsin, Trump would not have won Wisconsin without our low propensity efforts,” Kirk said in an interview with the Washington Examiner on Thursday afternoon.

The Washington Examiner spent a day door-knocking with the organization’s paid chase-the-vote operation in the Grand Canyon State, where they targeted these low-propensity Republican voters who have not participated in recent elections. The group developed a canvassing app that ballot-chasers use to identify their target voters who still had outstanding early ballots in their possession. 

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In the weeks ahead of the election, Republican operatives in a number of swing states had concerns that they weren’t seeing the same kind of ground operation from the Trump campaign or outside groups that they did in 2016 and 2020. Some were sounding the alarm over outsourcing critical get-out-the-vote efforts to groups that had little experience running successful field programs.

Kirk described feeling vindicated as the results of the November election continue to stream in. 

“When other people were too busy trying to plant stories against us, we were putting ballots in boxes,” he said.

Relying on groups like TPA and others also allowed the Trump campaign to focus on candidate travel and ads.

Still, Lennox believes the GOP should return to a more traditional top-down approach when it comes to ground game in future elections, emphasizing that this cycle’s results, relying on outside groups, may not be effective with a different candidate at the top of the ticket. 

“Anyone who thinks that outsourcing the ground game and only doing rallies is the recipe for a national governing majority is forgetting the fundamentals. President-elect Trump deserves all the credit, but he did something that no other Republican could have done,” he said.

“Outsourcing the ground game not only strips a party or candidate of control, but it allows consultants and vendors to make more money,” said Lennox.

TPA is pushing back on the notion that Republicans should return to the get-out-the-vote operations of the past. Through the 501(c)(3) and 501 (c)(4), the organization targeted young voters on college campuses, registered them, and then chased their ballots as first-time voters through their full-time staff of ballot chasers, using their mobile application, in addition to their ground operations in Arizona and Wisconsin.

“The incumbent players in this space — if we would have just done everything the way they wanted us to do, I’m convinced, you know, we might not win Pennsylvania, we might not win Ohio or Wisconsin,” said Andrew Kolvert, a spokesman for TPA.

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Kolvert said they are looking to implement their ground game strategy in Arizona across the country. 

“We are getting incoming from across the country, of people that want our help to implement what we did in Arizona across the country,” he said. “We made this movement — Turning Point and Charlie Kirk — in large part turned being conservative into something cool again,” he said.