Mobile apps, college football tailgates and Maryland lawmakers are all playing roles in conservatives’ strategy to turn out low-propensity voters in Pennsylvania and win the state for former President Donald Trump and down-ballot Republicans in November.
Pennsylvania is widely considered the most important swing state in former President Donald Trump’s bid to return to the White House, and the winner of the U.S. Senate race there could also determine the chamber’s balance of power. Trump lost Pennsylvania by approximately 81,000 votes in the 2020 race against President Joe Biden, but this time around Republicans are committed to ensuring a different outcome in the 2024 race by turning out voters who may lean toward Trump but may need an extra nudge to show up to the polls on election day.
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These are voters who do not vote in every election, but may have interest in voting for Trump, either because they are drawn to his policies or because they are deeply unhappy with the results of the Biden-Harris administration’s agenda.
The campaign’s plan to target this specific sliver of the electorate is not a traditional one, but the underlying idea is that these individuals are more likely to swing the election if they vote for Trump than are hardcore conservatives who are absolutely committed to voting for the former president and other Republicans down the ballot.
“There’s a lot of chatter from operatives and such saying, ‘Oh, nobody stopped at my door.’ If you’re a Republican political operative, we know who you’re going to vote for. We know that you know how to vote, and we know that you’re going to vote,” a Trump campaign official told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “So what’s the point of making sure we send a door knocker out to your door when there’s 50 other people that we could be targeting that we don’t know for sure if they’ll vote, or know how to vote, or know what’s at stake?”
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Cumberland County is one area where Republicans are putting their new strategy to the test. Republicans have politically dominated Cumberland County for decades, and Trump won it decisively in 2016 and 2020. However, Republicans on the ground say it is replete with the types of low-propensity voters who need to show up en masse for Trump to win the Keystone State.
The Daily Caller News Foundation spoke with nearly two dozen activists, volunteers, local GOP officials and Trump campaign officials on the ground in Cumberland County to learn more about the unorthodox plan that Republicans and conservative activists hope will deliver results on Nov. 5.
‘Get Out and Vote’
Apart from the Trump campaign, there is also an array of aligned third-party groups on the ground in Pennsylvania working to influence or mobilize all sorts of potential Trump voters. Those organizations include Elon Musk’s America PAC, Turning Point Action, Faith and Freedom Coalition and America First Works, among others.
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It is too early to tell whether this strategy will pay dividends, or how the mail ballots are breaking for either party. However, Republican officials and volunteers on the ground in Cumberland County and beyond see changes in voter registration over the past several years as an encouraging indicator.
In the 2020 election cycle, there were about 660,000 more registered Democrats than registered Republicans, but that advantage has decreased to about 354,000 for the 2024 cycle, according to The Hill. The campaign and aligned groups have had success registering voters and recruiting volunteers at expressly political events like Trump rallies, volunteers told the DCNF, but they have also extended their reach to other types of well-attended events to get possible Trump supporters to cast votes.
Looking to register voters at college football tailgates is one of these “novel” approaches to mobilization that the campaign and other aligned groups have pursued, the Trump campaign staffer told the DCNF. At a tailgate ahead of Sunday night’s NFL game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the New York Jets, conservative activists affiliated with Turning Point Action managed to register about 50 Trump supporters, according to Turning Point’s Noah Formica, who has helped thousands of voters register in Pennsylvania since the start of this year.
READ: Pennsylvania Senate Race Shifts To Toss-Up In Tightening Contest
Additionally, numerous volunteers and officials in Cumberland County told the DCNF that their anecdotal experiences indicate the energy and enthusiasm for Trump and other Republicans on the ground is robust and promising, though less tangible than voter registration data. The same goes for broad dissatisfaction with the Biden-Harris administration’s record, particularly the inflation that is pinching ordinary Americans, including those who populate Cumberland County.
“I truly believe these efforts were not done in 2020, and they weren’t quite as established in 2016,” Michelle Nestor, a Cumberland County state committeewoman for the GOP, told the DCNF. “We knew that in 2016, it was going to be close, but people didn’t give up, and in the end, we had the red state that we need this time around.”
“We aren’t going to let 2020 happen again, because we have the numbers,” Nestor said. “Get out and vote, that is our priority. And everybody as a team has stepped up and volunteered time and time again for this effort, because we can’t have another Biden administration.”
Volunteers and Apps
The Trump campaign has more than two dozen field offices in the state, door-knocking and phone-banking programs and thousands of volunteers participating in “Trump Force 47,” an initiative for local organizers and politically-engaged citizens to make contact with lower-propensity voters and get them out to vote, the Trump campaign official told the DCNF.
Many volunteers — whether they are with “Trump Force 47” or not — are using several mobile apps to identify the low-propensity voters in their communities and approach them to gauge interest in voting for Trump, especially by mail.
Trump Force 47 volunteers are “all over” Cumberland County, Nestor — who is also a “Trump Force 47” volunteer — told the DCNF.
“I think it’s a fantastic strategy, because instead of having one person try to reach 1,000 people, or 10 people trying to reach 1,000, you’ve got 1,000 people reaching 10 each,” Sherri Chippo, deputy chair of the Cumberland County Republican Committee and a “Trump Force 47” volunteer, told the DCNF. “It makes it a lot easier, a lot more doable for those who want to help but say, ‘I can’t commit to such a huge effort, I need to do a little bit, and I can do that.’ So I love that strategy.”
While Chippo is admittedly not the biggest fan of voting by mail, “it’s the game that we’re playing now, and if we don’t get involved in early voting, then we miss out on voters” who may not make it to the polls on Election Day, she explained to the DCNF.
Approximately 921,000 people have returned early ballots in Pennsylvania as of Monday, with about 578,000 of those voters being registered as Democrats against nearly 254,000 early votes submitted by registered Republicans, according to data from the Pennsylvania Secretary of State’s office. In total, the state has approved approximately 1,843,000 applications for early voters in the 2024 cycle, meaning that about 50% of approved early votes are still outstanding as of Monday.
Registered Republicans have so far managed to return about 254,000 early votes as of Monday, compared to the more than 580,000 early votes that registered Democrats have submitted to authorities statewide, according to the Pennsylvania Secretary of State’s data. In the 2020 race, registered Democrats returned just over 1.7 million ballots statewide, swamping the 623,000 or so that registered Republicans returned in that election cycle, according to the U.S. Elections Project’s analysis of data from the Pennsylvania Secretary of State’s office.
John Cobb, a Cumberland County local, is at the tip of the spear of voter mobilization effort in the county. He described how he and his fellow organizers have persistently targeted lower-propensity voters to turn them out to vote for Trump, senate hopeful Dave McCormick, incumbent Republican Rep. Scott Perry and a bevy of other Republican candidates seeking local and state office.
“With those low-propensity Republicans, we’ve got two primary programs. One is a door knocking program, and one is a call from home program,” Cobb told the DCNF. “And so the door knocking program is focused completely on low-propensity Republicans and trying to sign them up for mail ballots. We’ve probably hit about 2,500 doors this year so far. We’ve got a regular team of 22 people that will knock doors. We’ve had as many as 28 or 30 people knocking doors, and we typically do it once a month, and we started in the summer.”
“If you’ve ever done door knocking, 80-90% of folks don’t answer the door. They’re not home, or they’re watching TV, or whatever, they just don’t answer the door,” Cobb said. “So out of that 10%, supposing we hit 2,500 total so far, we’ve had about 250 people open the door, and out of that we’ve gotten about 100 people to fill out the mail ballot applications and hand them to us. We then take the applications to the Bureau of Elections on their behalf to get them signed up for mail ballots, and we’re continuing that.”
Cobb and other organizers have also used mobile apps to their advantage to get out the low-propensity Republican vote in Cumberland County with phone calls and texts, an initiative he says has allowed them to contact about 2,000 people. Of that figure, close to 500 people in the county have signed up for mail ballots, and the organizers plan to then use that same system and strategy to chase the mail ballots in circulation to remind voters to submit them on time, he told the DCNF. About 88% of Republican mail ballots were ultimately submitted on time in 2023 elections in the county, and the organizers are aiming for a 95% rate in the 2024 elections, Cobb told the DCNF.
While not perfect, the various mobile apps in use on the ground are user-friendly and effective tools to efficiently identify and target the low-propensity slice of the Republican electorate that could play a large role in determining the winners and losers of the coming elections, several volunteers with firsthand experience using the apps told the DCNF.
The Cavalry
It’s not just Pennsylvania Republicans who are on the ground in the state’s southern regions to get the vote out for GOP candidates. State lawmakers, activists and volunteers from Maryland have also made several trips into southern Pennsylvania over the course of several weeks to reinforce Pennsylvania conservatives in the area, including one outing that featured about 20 current and former elected Maryland officials.
Maryland will not be a competitive state in the presidential race, and there are many thousands of Marylanders who have moved across the state line into Pennsylvania in pursuit of lower costs of living and a more favorable tax environment in recent decades, former Republican Maryland Gov. Bob Ehrlich told the DCNF.
Many of these people still commute to work in Maryland as police officers, firemen, nurses and other jobs, maintaining ties to the state despite moving away for greener pastures.
When the convoys from Maryland make their way up to Pennsylvania to assist, the former Marylanders who call the Keystone State home are often pleased to see them when they knock on doors and make contact, Republican Maryland State Sen. Mary Beth Carozza told the DCNF.
“We’ll talk, and we’ll recognize that they were from Maryland. And a lot of them will say, ‘We left Maryland because the tax policies that were in place and the cost of living was cheaper in Pennsylvania,’ but they still work in Maryland. A lot of them still go right down I-83 and work in Maryland,” Carozza told the DCNF. “Many have said, ‘Thanks for being here.’ And we have talked to them and met them in other places over the couple of times we’ve been here. And they’ve said, ‘Oh, we let somebody else know that there are some Maryland legislators up here and working and knocking on doors,’ and you can see that it has spread out a lot.”
Some of the current and former lawmakers who have made the trips north include Ehrlich, Maryland State Senate Minority Leader Steve Hershey, former Maryland House of Delegates Minority Leader Ellen Sauerbrey, Republican State Sen. J.B. Jennings, and Republican Dels. Brian Chisholm, Chris Tomlinson and Tony Fulton. All were present in Cumberland County on Thursday to knock doors and get out the vote other than Fulton, who was delivering aid to Hurricane Helene victims in North Carolina.
Beyond simply encouraging voters to support Trump or oppose Vice President Harris at the polls, the reinforcements from Maryland also show up at voters’ doors with a simple message that resonates especially with Pennsylvanians still living with one foot in Maryland.
“One of the important messages we provided to many of the Pennsylvania residents when we were door knocking and making voter contact was ‘Don’t let Pennsylvania become the Maryland you moved away from,’” Hershey told the DCNF. “This really seemed to resonate with Pennsylvanian voters, especially the independents and unaffiliated registered voters.”
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