How Trump’s Obsession Could Tank His Own Campaign

Donald Trump’s obsession with convincing his supporters to surveil the upcoming presidential election may ultimately be hurting his campaign.

The Republican nominee has repeatedly claimed that Republican Party officials only need to focus on ensuring election integrity in November, and has centered his campaign’s efforts on recruiting thousands of poll watchers and poll workers. As a result, the campaign is relying on a constellation of outside groups to rustle up the traditional networks of volunteer door-knockers and canvassers.

These groups include Elon Musk’s incredibly shady America PAC as well as Turning Point Action, the advocacy arm of white-nationalist Charlie Kirk’s organization. A recent FEC rule change from March now allows for canvassing super PACs to coordinate directly with campaigns on messaging and campaign data. As a result, Trump’s scrappier in-house volunteer program can be boosted by funds from megadonors.

However, outsourcing this aspect of the campaign could prove problematic if strong personnel and structural dynamics don’t fall into place. The America PAC recently underwent a change in leadership, which caused it to clean house with its vendors supplying the workers.

The Trump campaign said it has rounded up more than 150,000 poll watchers and poll workers, reviving concerns about voter intimidation that first cropped up in 2020. The number of employed campaign staff and campaign volunteers is far smaller.

James Blair, the campaign’s political director, posted about the campaign’s operations on X Thursday, following a report from Axios that relied on numbers he’d shared last week.

In his update, Blair wrote that the campaign was bolstered by 14,500 community volunteers called “Trump Force 47 captains.” He said 2,500 of them had been trained in the last week alone, and has previously estimated that another two thousand would join every week until election day.

Last week, Blair had said that outside groups had employed more than 1,000 canvassers in battleground states, which would rise to 2,500 by election day. He said that the campaign employed hundreds of staff across the battleground states.

The Republican National Committee had plans in place for a more expansive canvassing effort, those plans were discarded once Trump’s team took over in March, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post .

While Trump’s focus on election integrity may not have been a detractor when he was running against President Joe Biden, it certainly looks that way now. Since announcing her candidacy, Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign said it has worked with 330,000 volunteers and has a staff of 15,000 people.

“What’s happened in the last couple of weeks is we actually have a real race. This is a real presidential campaign. The Biden-Trump version of this was one event a week by each candidate, very rarely on the campaign trail and no real engagement,” Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist, told the Post . “Now this is going to be one of those campaigns where strategies matter, resources matter, time matters, and there is not much room for error.”

Several people close to the Trump campaign told the Post that there was an ongoing effort to get the easily distractible candidate to focus more on attacking Harris and other Democrats.

Trump has falsely claimed that Democrats are actually encouraging illegal immigration for the purpose of bolstering their voter base. Meanwhile, he was the one who killed a bipartisan border deal earlier this year that would have helped curb the entry of undocumented immigrants in the United States.

Trump has repeatedly said the priority of the Republican Party is to tighten election restrictions, but his fearmongering is fed by his own baseless claims of election fraud and conspiracy theories about widespread noncitizen voting. Trump’s election martyrdom from 2020 may be the nail in the coffin of his 2024 campaign.

This story has been updated.