Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential election campaign has launched a major push to recruit and deploy volunteers in the six battleground states. Capitalizing on the momentum generated by Ms. Harris’s entry into the race, the campaign raised more than $200 million over the first week and recruited some 360,000 additional volunteers, according to Battleground States Director Dan Kanninen.
“The groundswell of support around the vice president is real, and it is visible, and it is meaningful,” Mr. Kanninen told reporters on July 29. “Our task now is to translate that into action.”
The effort kicked off on the weekend of July 27, less than a week after Ms. Harris entered the race. Over that weekend, the campaign fielded more than 29,000 volunteers who knocked on some 126,000 doors, hosted 2,300 events, and made nearly 770,000 phone calls, Mr. Kanninen said.
“This election is going to be incredibly close,” said Michael Tyler, the campaign’s communications director. Ms. Harris herself has acknowledged that she is an underdog in the contest. However, the volunteer structure of the Harris campaign is designed for a close race, according to Mr. Kanninen.
That structure includes on-the-ground volunteers in battleground states to engage in voter outreach, as well as remote volunteers who will make phone calls and engage in electronic outreach to voters.
“We were only able to pull off—this massive mobilization—because of the battleground infrastructure we already had in place,” Mr. Kanninen told reporters in a telephone briefing.
The Harris campaign has more than 260 field offices across the battleground states and 1,300 staff members, according to the campaign.
Battleground Turnout
The 2020 presidential election hinged on Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona, which were won by relatively small percentages of the vote. President Biden won in Georgia by fewer than 12,000 out of nearly 5 million votes cast. In Wisconsin, the president won by fewer than 20,000 votes.
This year both campaigns have focused significant attention on these six states, which account for 75 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win. Voter turnout in the 2020 election rose to the highest level in decades with more than 158.4 million people voting, according to Pew Research Center. However, that still accounted for less than 64 percent of the voting-age population.
The number of Hispanic voters is projected to increase significantly in 2024 according to Arturo Vargas, the CEO of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) Educational Fund. More than 17.5 million Hispanic voters are likely to participate in the 2024 election, Mr. Vargas reported in February, an increase of 6.5 percent of 2020 and 38.3 percent over 2016.
Trump Ground Game
The Trump campaign has made an effort to improve its ground game in 2024, including recruiting precinct captains to rally voters and opening more field offices. The Trump campaign announced a grassroots organizing effort in May, dubbed Trump Force 47. The program aims to use manpower provided by state and local Republican parties and allied organizations to recruit and deploy volunteers to turn out targeted voters in battleground states.
Volunteers are asked to do voter outreach activities such as phone banking, hosting house parties, precinct organizing, or delivering yard signs. The number of volunteers to be mobilized was not specified. By mid-June the Trump campaign had opened two campaign offices in Pennsylvania. However, the Democrats already had 24 campaign sites operating with more than 100 staff members in place by that time and had spent months conducting voter outreach activities.
Six weeks later, the Trump campaign had opened one additional office while the Democrats had an additional 12 sites operating in the Keystone State, according to the Harris Campaign.
The Trump Campaign has made a concerted effort to reach minority voters in this election, launching Blacks for Trump and Latinos for Trump initiatives. Former President Trump has also campaigned in traditional Democratic strongholds including Minnesota, New York, New Jersey, and Virgina in an apparent attempt to bring those states into play.
However, the Trump campaign, in partnership with the Republican National Committee (RNC), appears more intent on mobilizing volunteers to staff its election integrity initiative. “Having the right people to count the ballots is just as important as turning out voters on Election Day,” former President Trump said in an April 19 statement announcing the effort.
Republicans aim to mobilize and train more than 100,000 poll watchers and volunteer attorneys to deploy in battleground states to ensure election integrity and transparency. “Every ballot. Every precinct. Every processing center. Every county. Every battleground state. We will be there,” said Lara Trump, co-chair of the RNC, in a statement. She added that the RNC plans to hire hundreds of election integrity workers and will have attorneys onsite at all ballot processing centers.
Austin Alonzo contributed to this report.
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