Dan McLaughlin of National Review Online highlights one group’s work to get voters to the polls.
There are real reasons to wonder whether Donald Trump’s campaign, despite doing well in the polls of late, may come up short in key states. The ground game may not matter in a lopsided race, but in state after state, the polling margins right now are the sort where the superior get-out-the-vote (GOTV) operation could matter. …
… “[T]he Trump campaign’s strategy of effectively outsourcing its get-out-the-vote operations to Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point Action and Elon Musk’s America PAC” is very unproven, and many campaign veterans are worried. …
… But outside of the MAGA trifecta of Trump, Kirk, and Musk, there’s another big operation in the field getting less attention: Americans for Prosperity Action, the political arm of Americans for Prosperity. AFP Action, the libertarian-leaning, free-market super PAC of the Charles Koch network, hasn’t endorsed in the presidential race, after backing Nikki Haley in the primary. It’s not focusing its messages on the White House. But it has endorsed Republican candidates in seven Senate races. … The AFP network is also involved in 44 House races and overall is engaged in nearly 650 races across the country. …
… That could matter, and not just in the races AFP Action is targeting. It could also end up helping Trump in spite of remaining at arm’s length from him and his election. Ticket-splitting and abstentions still exist, so Republican GOTV at any level isn’t a one-to-one relationship with the rest of the ballot. And the sorts of voters Trump may especially need to reach by GOTV operations — low-propensity voters who may not be traditionally Republican voters — are not the typical target for groups such as AFP Action, which is as interested in persuasion of regular voters as it is in GOTV. But it is at least likely that voters who turn out for McCormick, Rogers, Hovde, or Sam Brown are a good deal likelier to support Trump than to support Kamala Harris.
