Four Signs Biden’s Field Operation Is Floundering

A decisive factor!

A robust ground game alone doesn’t win national elections. But in competitive races, the number and effectiveness of your field staff and volunteers can be the difference between victory and defeat.

“In an election like this, where it’s going to come down to a few thousand votes in a couple of states, that’s when your ground game matters,” Republican National Committee (RNC) Chair Ronna McDaniel told the press.

That statement has been proven time and again in American politics. While Hillary Clinton outraised Donald Trump in 2016, as Joe Biden has in recent months, the Trump campaign’s field operation is quietly breaking records, while Biden’s is floundering. Here are the reasons why.

Less Than Half the Field Staff

The RNC and Trump reelection campaign has 1,500 field staffers engaging in targeted door knocking (the gold standard of voter contacts) across 20 states — as part of the largest field operation ever mounted by Republicans.

The Biden campaign hoped to have 600 field staff on the ground by the end of June. Unlike the RNC, which has had staffers in critical states conducting field and phone canvassing for years, the Biden team only recently began announcing the names of its battlefield state directors.

Data Disadvantage

Campaigns are all about voter data. President Obama’s reelection campaign taught the GOP that lesson the hard way when Mitt Romney lost decisively — despite winning independents.

Instead of disproportionately focusing on the narrow sliver of swing voters, Obama’s team made a concerted effort to contact low-propensity Democrat-leaning voters (in other words, people who prefer Democrats but were unlikely to vote) with a new message intended to motivate them. Their most successful tactic was painting Republicans as anti-women and using that talking point to mobilize young, single women, already Democrat-leaners, to vote in record numbers.

Like Obama before him, the Trump reelection campaign is finding new voters from the much larger universe of low-propensity voters. The RNC has invested $350 million into this technology, which was once only wielded by the left. One of the most innovative tools in the RNC’s arsenal is “Trump Talk,” which harnesses publicly available voter information to provide staff and supporters with tailor-made questions for individual, conservative-leaning voters.

Biden is solely relying on his team and volunteer network to make voter contacts through phone calls.

Door Knocking? Not So Fast…

While the Trump campaign has resumed person-to-person contact to influence voters, Biden’s field operation remains virtual, even though it’s common knowledge that phone calls don’t produce the same results as door knocking.

Behavioral psychologists have proven that when conveyed through field canvassing, voter persuasion messages were by far the most effective.

So where do the campaigns stand?

The Trump campaign says it knocked on one million targeted doors in the past week alone. Joe Biden’s campaign admitted it knocked on zero. The Biden campaign recently confirmed that literature drops are the closest it plans to come to face-to-face campaigning.

Voter Registration Crisis

While the trove of data collected by the RNC and Trump campaign remains a highly-guarded secret, it is known that the president’s efforts to erode the Democrats’ voter registration advantage in crucial swing states have already paid off.

The RNC and Trump campaign have dwarfed their voter registration numbers from the last cycle, slashing the party registration advantage Democrats enjoy in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Florida compared to 2016 when Trump prevailed in all three states.

Republicans have gained 133,000 new voters compared to Democrats in Pennsylvania, 216,410 new voters compared to Democrats in North Carolina, and 87,000 new voters compared to Democrats in Florida.

Do you intend to volunteer before Election Day or have you already done so? Let us know by sharing your experiences in the comments section below!

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