Republicans tout ground game after Trump victory

by Ben Kamisar - 11/09/16 5:57 PM ET

The Republican National Committee is trumpeting its increased investments into the party’s ground game as a key piece of the strategy that led to the stunning election of President-elect Donald Trump.

While Republicans admit that Trump’s populist message uniquely resonated with large swaths of persuadable voters, they point to the boots on the ground as a major factor of what helped to bring the historic 2016 election home.

{mosads}“Our ground game knew where this silent vote was…it was a matter of getting it out. The people who voted for Donald Trump are people we touched and found out who they were,” said Ashley Bell, a senior RNC strategist, in an interview with The Hill.

“Were they more receptive because we had a candidate speaking to the issues they cared about? That’s always helpful…It was about identifying this vote and mobilizing.”

Unlike most nominees in recent history, Trump ceded his ground game to the party, forcing them to pick up the slack in a role typically led by the campaign itself. While Trump’s robust data operation focused largely on the fundraising and digital-outreach side, it was the national party’s boots on the ground advocating up and down the ticket.

That led to a massive Democratic ground-game advantage over the final weeks — 5,138 paid staffers in 15 states compared to 1,409 staffers in 16 states for the Republicans, according to an October count by The Hill based on FEC records.

But the RNC points to its permanent staff that began setting up shop in swing states as early as 2013 as determinative in overcoming that gap. While the Democrats’ numbers showed advantages in key metrics like in-person voter contacts in the run-up to Election Day, huge turnout in rural Republican areas overshadowed the vote in many Democratic strongholds.

The RNC’s internal projections had Trump down going into the weekend, but within striking distance with the swing vote. Bell said that the “3 to 5 percent” of the vote was what tilted the election to Trump.

“But that 3 to 5 percent doesn’t matter unless you max-out the voters you are supposed to get,” he said.

“For us, the unconventionality of this election had always been we knew had an excellent shot if we could get the Republican Party to come home.”

While there’s a long shadow cast on exit polling thanks to the staggering failure by pollsters to predict Trump’s victory, the available numbers show that Trump performed slightly better with minorities than Mitt Romney did in 2012 and that Clinton performed worse with both blacks and Hispanics despite the Republican’s controversial rhetoric.

Those numbers had Trump at 29 percent of the Hispanic vote and 8 percent of the black vote, compared to Romney’s 27 percent with Hispanics and 6 percent with blacks. In Pennsylvania, for example, Romney won 6 percent of the black vote and 18 percent of the Hispanic vote. But exits show Trump winning 7 percent of the black vote and 22 percent of the Hispanic vote.

Bell, the RNC’s highest ranking African-American and a former Democrat, pointed to the party’s push to hold events in black barber-shops, community-based small businesses, in cities like Detroit, Philadelphia and Cleveland. Sometimes, the party paid for lunches, while other times, surrogates would swing by just to take the pulse of the community.

While estimates show the party won just 4 percent of black women, the party pushed the vote among black men to between 13 and 15 percent, he said.

“We doubled down on barber shops — we made every advisory council go find us barber shops,” he said.

“Hitting a barber shop has a reverberating effect — the same conversation could happen 8 or 10 times a day….we wanted to inject the Republican Party into that loop of discussion that would go on while we were there and while we were gone.”

Tags Donald Trump