Donald Trump is bringing a tried-and-true business practice for boosting efficiency to his campaign for the White House: outsourcing.
The former president is leaving the overwhelming bulk of a key voter-turnout activity—knocking on doors and speaking directly to voters—in the hands of outside interest groups in order to redirect the limited financial resources of his own campaign elsewhere.
That’s because a new ruling by the Federal Election Committee (FEC) in March decreed that campaigns could now coordinate directly with their donors, including political action committees, all the way down to what message is addressed to which demographic when icanvassing neighborhoods.
Never before have interest groups been given such free rein to operate so clearly as a de facto arm of the campaign. In the past, canvassing on behalf of a candidate was considered to be a contribution-in-kind, in other words a non-monetary donation subject to the same campaign finance limits as a cash gift.
“This is really the first at-scale test of this decision, let alone a high-stakes presidential election,” said Meredith McCoy, a Washington, DC-based partner with the law firm Venable, who specializes in campaign finance law.
Many of her clients have since been peppering her with questions regarding the FEC rulling, she said. And there’s nothing stopping the Democrats or their allies from copying the approach. “Campaigns now see the green light to outsource their ground games,” McCoy said.
Lean operations typical of a manufacturer
Canvassing is believed to be a far more effective tool than blanketing the airwaves with advertising, since it leverages the enthusiasm of volunteers engaging on a personal level with individual voters. And if this year’s race is anything like four years ago—a contest Trump lost by roughly 44,000 votes across three swing states—the margin of victory could be another nail-biter.
Relinquishing the overwhelming bulk of this to political action committees—like Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA or Elon Musk’s America First—allows Trump’s campaign to coordinate with their third-party canvassers with no firewall. This conserves the financial resources that Trump and the RNC would otherwise have spent on recruiting an army of volunteers in each battleground state.
This approach mirrors the philosophy of a lean manufacturer. A carmaker like Porsche, for example, tends to focus its shareholders’ precious capital exclusively in areas where it feels it has the greatest competitive advantage or that are brand relevant, such as design, engineering and marketing. The rest—spark plugs, crankshafts, windshields, tires and whatnot—are supplied by third parties.
“There’s something to the notion that relying on privatized service providers is second nature to Trump,” said Donald Green, author of “Get Out the Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout” and professor at Columbia University.
One reason for that, Green tells Fortune, is an inherent disadvantage the GOP has at canvassing compared with the Democrats. Its voter base is scattered across the vast open distances in rural communities, so going door-to-door takes much longer and reaches fewer people.
The Dems' voters, by contrast, tend to live in more dense urban environments.
“The two parties have different cost structures because one is geographically concentrated, and the other is not,” he says. “So in some ways that makes it more cost effective for Democratic mobilization efforts.”
'A lot of work to do until November'
The first signs Trump would avail himself of the new method came in April, one month after the FEC ruling. Conservative media reported Trump had gutted the RNC's staff, removing previous chair Ronna McDaniel and replacing her with his daughter-in-law Lara alongside North Carolina GOP chair Michael Whatley.
According to their GOP sources, Trump felt a mobilization campaign of the size and scale from 2016 was overkill, betting his devoted base would be there for him on election come what may.
Instead he wanted to reassign resources to focus on election integrity, ostensibly fearing a repeat of 2020—a contest he still maintains to this day he won.
“He was very clear about that—for the last six months: ‘I’m not worried about turning out the vote, I just want to catch the cheaters,” a GOP insider told The Dispatch.
Months later and the RNC still appears to be lagging in terms of boots-on-the-ground. At the start of this month, the Washington Post reported Trump continued to pursue a “bare-bones in-house field program” relying on megadonors to step into the breach.
A few weeks ago this lean strategy might have been a case for academic debate. After Biden’s frail performance in the first debate, it looked as if there was no stopping Trump. After surviving the attempt on his life last month, the consensus opinion was he would romp to victory.
However, after Harris replaced Biden at the top of the ticket, the polls narrowed to a dead heat, with some suggesting she may even be leading.
Mobilization is now everything, Columbia’s Green says, since today’s hyperpartisanship means there are fewer and fewer swing voters. Most have made up their mind whether they are for Trump or against him. That means the effectiveness of his third-party partners knocking on doors could be the deciding factor.
With so much riding on November, the Trump campaign has sought to push back on concerns it may have committed a mistake by relying on an untested, unproven strategy.
“We have a lot of work to do from now until November, but we are better prepared than we have ever been,” the campaign’s political director, James Blair, posted last week on X. He claimed they had an “ever-expanding ground game” with “hundreds of paid staff across battleground states”.
The RNC could not be reached by Fortune for comment.
