Armies of political operatives are fanned out across key battlegrounds to hustle votes in the close contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
In a presidential race this competitive, the campaign with the most effective voter turnout operation has an advantage.
That’s why the Clinton campaign and the Republican National Committee, running data and field operations for the Trump campaign, have opened hundreds of offices and deployed thousands of personnel to push voters to the polls in the states that will determine the next president.
Both sides are claiming the upper hand. In dueling conference calls with reporters on Thursday, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook, and RNC political director Chris Carr, said they were encouraged by the initial returns from early and absentee voting.
Election Day is Nov. 8, but the White House could be won or lost on the ground long before then.
“We’re seeing particularly high turnout in strong Democratic areas and we’re seeing strong turnout among Democratic demographic groups, such as African Americans, Hispanics and Asian Americans,” Mook said.
“We’re seeing positive trends across the board,” Carr said.
In 2008 and 2012, President Obama’s campaign assembled the superior voter turnout operation.
Obama’s data analytics, which measures Americans’ attitudes and propensity to vote using hundreds of data points, was more technologically advanced. So was his campaign’s field strategy — how it used staff and volunteers to contact voters in person, urge them to vote, and make sure they showed up.
The Clinton campaign has built on this foundation. Clinton put together a team deep on data and field knowhow, innovating on the technology and strategy that helped re-elect Obama four years ago.
Everyday, the Clinton campaign collects information that allows it to model the likely universe of voters far beyond what is available in traditional polling and adjust in real time its messaging and geographic focus.
That gives Clinton an operational and strategic edge over Trump, who outsourced his ground game to the RNC. But whether that holds down the stretch remains to be seen.
Beginning just after the GOP’s 2012 loss, the RNC invested more than $100 million in new data and field programs that were modeled after the Obama campaign.
The RNC was pleased with how they functioned in the 2014, and continued to fine-tune them heading into 2016. In some battlegrounds, RNC field staff remained on the ground after the midterms to get a jump on the presidential election.
“The RNC has been leading the field efforts since 2013,” a party official told the Washington Examiner. “We’re working hand-in-glove in with the Trump campaign but it is the RNC that is carrying out the majority of the GOTV efforts.”
The RNC and the Clinton campaign were reluctant to discuss the intricacies of their field and data strategies.
But there are some metrics available to compare their reach. First, in terms of field offices, using numbers provided by the RNC and the Clinton campaign, the Democratic nominee appears better positioned:
- Colorado — 11 RNC offices; 27 Clinton offices
- Florida — 60 RNC offices; 67 Clinton offices.
- Iowa — 10 RNC offices; 33 Clinton offices
- Maine — 1 RNC office; 13 Clinton offices
- Michigan — 8 RNC offices; 34 Clinton offices
- Nevada — 9 RNC offices; 19 Clinton offices
- New Hampshire — 11 RNC offices; 26 Clinton offices
- North Carolina — 24 RNC offices; 33 Clinton offices
- Ohio — 43 RNC offices; 60 Clinton offices
- Pennsylvania — 26 RNC offices; 55 Clinton offices
- Virginia — 21 RNC offices; 34 Clinton offices
- Wisconsin — 24 RNC offices; 41 Clinton offices
Paid field staff is another key indicator of voter turnout effectiveness. The more personnel, the more doors get knocked on and community events get visited. The Clinton campaign declined to reveal the number of paid field staff it has deployed.
The RNC said that it has 979 paid staff working in 11 battleground states: North Carolina, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Nevada, Michigan, Ohio, New Hampshire, Florida, Colorado and Iowa. Both the RNC and the Clinton campaign claim thousands of unpaid volunteers as part of their GOTV armies.
“We talk about the ground game — ours I would put up against [Trump’s] any day,” Mook told reporters during a press conference in Farmville, Va., just prior to the vice presidential debate.
A little more than four weeks before Election Day, Clinton and the RNC are focused on maximizing voter registration and banking early and absentee votes.
The more each side can pad the rolls with voters likely to support their candidate, the better their prospects. Several of the targeted states cut off voter registration at some point in October, although a few allow Americans to register to vote up through Nov. 8.
Winning the battle of the early and absentee vote requires a campaign to identify those individuals who are supportive of its candidate but are unlikely to vote, and then use the run-up to Election Day to convince them to cast a ballot.
The Clinton campaign has blanketed the battleground states with top surrogates, like Obama, Vice President Biden, First Lady Michelle Obama, and former President Bill Clinton, according to their voter registration deadlines and early and absentee voting kickoff dates to drive up turnout.
Clinton is headed to Detroit on Monday, the day after the second presidential debate and the day before voter registration closes in Michigan, to encourage her supporters there to register to vote.
The RNC’s Carr said during the Thursday conference call that voter registration is his big priority this month. So far, he’s happy with the gains the GOP has made compared to the same period in the 2012 campaign.
“We have a tremendous head start on the Clinton campaign,” he said.
“We are turning out more of our low-propensity voters than Republicans,” Mook countered.
T. Becket Adams contributed to this report.
