LANSING, Michigan — Republican activists in key states say they have seen little sign of the teams knocking on doors and turning out casual voters on Donald Trump’s behalf, raising concerns that the party’s presidential nominee is relying on outside groups for a significant portion of his campaign operations.
Trump and the Republican National Committee he controls have chosen to share voter mobilization duties in key areas of the most competitive states this year with groups such as America PAC, the organization backed by billionaire Elon Musk.
It’s hard to argue that something isn’t happening. But with less than 50 days to go until the Nov. 5 election, dozens of Republican officials, activists and operatives in Michigan, North Carolina and other key states say they’ve rarely, if ever, seen the group’s canvassers. In Arizona and Nevada, the Elon Musk-backed political action committee replaced its door-knocking agency last week.
“I haven’t seen anybody,” said Nate Wilkowski, the Republican Party’s campaign manager in vote-rich Oakland County, Michigan, which includes key Detroit suburbs. He was talking specifically about America PAC. “Nobody has warned me that they’re in the Oakland County areas.”
Trump has relied on the loyalty of his base in an election that is likely to hinge on turnout. But sporadic evidence of what has been portrayed as a sophisticated operation has led some party activists to question the value of the operation. Trump’s campaign views the race with Vice President Kamala Harris as a gamble among likely voters, but believes she has the edge among those who abstained in 2016 and 2020, making reaching them even more critical.
That work is especially important in Michigan, where Trump lost by fewer than 160,000 votes in 2020, and where the GOP began the year mired in debt and battling a bitter contest for the state party’s legitimate leader.
Michigan Republican Party Chairman Pete Hoekstra said he was informed that PAC America canvassers had arrived in late August and were working. A PAC spokesman said canvassers were present in Michigan, as well as Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the seven most competitive states. The spokesman declined to say how many canvassers there were in each state.
Meghan Reckling, the owner of a Republican canvassing agency in Michigan, said she spotted two America PAC canvassers in Oakland County on Tuesday. Identifiable by their blue polo shirts emblazoned with “America,” they were working in an area that Reckling’s own data showed was an area where voters were unlikely to vote, she said.
“You could say they had a very pleasant exchange with the lady who answered the door and probably chatted with her for five minutes,” Reckling said. “From what I observed, they were clearly having a direct conversation.”
But in interviews with more than two dozen party activists and officials in the seven key states, such reports were rare.
“I don’t know what the PACs are doing,” said Mark Forton, chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County, Michigan, a densely populated suburb northeast of Detroit. “I don’t know if they’re going door to door.”
Trump advisers say the campaign has about 30,000 volunteer captains who identify voters least likely to vote at the local level, including through outreach campaigns.
The campaign’s political director, James Blair, also estimates that about 2,500 paid canvassers, of which America PAC is a significant portion, are working in the seven states. The PAC has paid solicitation firms more than $14 million since mid-August for their work on the presidential campaign, according to Federal Election Commission spending reports filed by the group.
Blair rejected the claim that the campaign was handing over work to outside groups. Instead, he said, the campaign was using “the resources of those groups to increase the frequency of contact and the total coverage in the universe where we want it.”
“We’re focusing primarily on low-propensity voters because that’s what makes the most strategic sense in terms of how the president is going to win those states, and the efforts of those groups have helped reach them,” Blair said.
America PAC is led by former aides to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ failed presidential campaign. Trump’s team also shares responsibility for reaching less frequent voters with groups such as Turning Point USA, led by conservative millennial figure Charlie Kirk, and the Faith and Freedom Coalition, led by conservative Christian figure Ralph Reed.
The campaign’s decision was prompted in part by an FEC ruling this year that a candidate’s campaign and outside groups could coordinate canvassing efforts with super PACs, including sharing voter registrations and the data they collect door-to-door. That means campaigns could share much of their labor- and cost-intensive field efforts with groups that can accept unlimited donations.
Harris’ field efforts in all seven states are being conducted by paid campaign staffers, who number nearly 2,200 in more than 328 offices. Campaign staffers said that groups affiliated with labor organizations are canvassing independently of the campaign.
The vast majority of the activity by outside groups supporting Harris is advertising. Based on ad bookings for Harris and the major super PAC supporting her, they are on track to outspend the Trump campaign and the major super PACs supporting him by Election Day by nearly $175 million. Harris’ campaign has outspent Trump’s campaign on advertising twice as much since she entered the race on July 23, according to media tracking firm AdImpact.
Over the past week, complications have arisen for America PAC, the largest of the groups helping Trump in 2024.
America PAC has fired September Group, a Nevada-based solicitation firm, according to two people familiar with the matter. America PAC had paid the company nearly $2.7 million a month ago, according to FEC filings. The people familiar with the September Group firing spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private business decisions.
A spokesperson for America PAC declined to confirm the decision.
Trump is not the first candidate to delegate some typical campaign tasks to outside groups. But the approach has not gone smoothly for some of the other candidates who have tried it.
Last year, DeSantis outsourced much of the political communications for his Republican presidential campaign to a super PAC called Never Back Down, whose board and top campaign staffers had conflicts in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses. Although he started the campaign with about $100 million, DeSantis dropped out after losing the primary election in Iowa.
In his unsuccessful bid for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush tried something very similar, handing off much of the political infrastructure work to a super PAC called Right to Rise, which raised more than $114 million in 2015.
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Beaumont reported from Des Moines, Iowa. Associated Press writers Scott Bauer in Madison, Wisconsin, Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Gary D. Robertson in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Jonathan J. Cooper in Phoenix contributed to this report.
