Since the campaign season began, experts have assured us that Donald Trump had “no ground game”. Pundits and partisan observers repeated this charge and scoffed at his ramshackle, amateur, and fraud-riddled efforts. A slew of articles unfavourably compared Trump’s “paltry” get-out-the-vote operation to the Democrats’ supposedly well-oiled machine. Alex Floyd, the Democratic National Committee’s rapid response director, confidently stated in April that “Donald Trump’s Maga takeover of the [Republican National Committee] has left the Republican party in shambles, lacking the ground game and infrastructure to compete this November.”
Yet many Democrats remain reluctant to reassess their views. After the election, Tom O’Brien, chair of the Democratic party in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, told the New York Times that Republicans “really didn’t have a ground game”. Democratic strategist Christy Setzer insisted to The Hill that “Trump had no ground game and ran only on rambling hatred”, while claiming the loss “wasn’t the fault of Kamala Harris”, who had “the best campaign any of us has ever seen”. But if that’s true, why did Trump succeed where Harris failed?
Trump succeeded, at least in part, because he had a strong ground game, even if it often looked different from what observers expected. This included “untraditional” and “micro-targeted” strategies aimed at reaching low- and mid-propensity voters who didn’t fit the usual Republican profile, including Latinos, Black men, and Asian and Arab Americans. The rocky launch of Elon Musk’s America Pac, which hired canvassers in key areas, became a punchline, but it supplemented other efforts. Musk has invested $120m in the project and is already planning for the 2026 midterms and beyond.
Belittling and discounting Trump’s operation might make liberals feel better, but strategically, it’s self-defeating. This hubris leaves Democrats oblivious to their opponents’ achievements while they overestimate their own approach. Since Harris’s defeat, even moderate commentators are waking up to the need for Democrats to shift their messaging to appeal to working-class voters. But tweaks to language are not enough. The definition of “ground game” must evolve as well. “Knocking on doors eight or nine times”, as O’Brien described his party’s efforts, will not be enough to remedy the Democrats’ current disadvantage.
A few weeks before the election, in Greensboro, North Carolina, Nikki Marín Baena was approached by a canvasser from Libre Initiative, a Koch-backed organisation that targets Latino communities with a libertarian agenda. The canvasser offered Spanish-language workshops, English tutoring, computer classes and more. Baena, co-founder of Siembra NC, which organises around workers’ rights, noted that Libre’s goal is to get people in a room, help them meet their basic needs, and then preach the gospel of small government. This kind of service-oriented outreach is something Democrats could learn from.
