Inside the Trump campaign’s hidden ground game

The party says its get-out-the-vote effort, dubbed “Trump Force 47," is driven by a dedicated army of volunteers. It has been shrouded in secrecy since it launched earlier this year, raising questions in political circles about the ground-game strategy to support Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. Behind the scenes, campaign strategists have been revamping what they viewed as an inefficient, bloated and antiquated Republican ground-game model.

They argued that trying to play catch up with the Democratic canvassing machine, which has long had vast resources and is deeply rooted in states across the country, was a losing game. Now the GOP is focused on efficiency, not the size of the operation.

“The practical reality is the program devolved to mostly paid staff grinding out door knocking and phones, and it was all about volume, volume, volume, driving as much volume as possible," said James Blair, a top strategist for the Trump campaign. “There’s not good evidence that all voter contacts are created equal."

But the party’s field organizing is so small that some local Republican officials say they are anxious it won’t be enough. The RNC has anywhere from a dozen to two dozen offices in battleground states, while President Biden’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee have about 200 across the country, with nearly 50 here in Wisconsin alone.

The Biden campaign has gone so far as to question whether Trump has a ground game.

Despite an intentionally smaller footprint, the organizing looks a lot like traditional field work. On a hotter-than-normal Saturday morning before the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, about a dozen Trump Force 47 volunteers huddled in a small office in this suburb of the state’s largest city. They divided up street assignments and went door-to-door to convince voter targets—those who don’t vote in every election and might be persuaded to back Trump—to turn out for the former president this fall.

“We’re focused on turning out people that are guaranteed to vote for Trump as long as they go vote," Blair said.

The Trump Force 47 sign-up page online calls for volunteers to help with neighborhood voter outreach and calls, poll watching, yard-sign delivery and more. It asks if volunteers are willing to throw “a Trump House Party" to raise awareness in their communities.

The campaign is doing field work in the seven battleground states this year, which include Wisconsin, and they are ramping up operations in a handful of states the Trump campaign believes are in play this year, such as Virginia and Minnesota. The operation also helps down-ballot candidates.

Trump has opened a 6-point lead over Biden among voters nationally, with 80% saying that the president is too old to run for a second term, a Wall Street Journal poll found earlier this month. Trump also holds leads over Biden in most battleground state polling. Some polls show the Republican competitive in places such as Virginia, where Democrats usually dominate in presidential election years.

Officials with the Trump campaign argued that the old way of doing things needed to change—partly because times have changed, partly because Trump is an unconventional candidate. What works for him, they added, might not work for the 2028 presidential nominee. They will cross that bridge when they come to it.

Former president Barack Obama’s successful re-election campaign in 2012 has been viewed as the model—not only by Democrats, but until this cycle, by the Republican Party, which studied its tactics. Obama’s campaign launched a multiyear, multibillion-dollar operation that raised and spent more money than any other election effort in history. The Obama campaign built the most sophisticated voter targeting technology ever before used on a national campaign, according to political strategists.

After the Trump campaign’s takeover of the RNC earlier this year, strategists decided to revamp the model by diving deep into its voter contact base to determine specific targets. Officials found that in the last election cycle, the RNC made 79 million attempted voter contacts across the seven battleground states with an office expenditure of about $150 million. But in reality, only three million of those voters were reached in some form. That, they concluded, was wasteful and ineffective.

Blair said the focus has shifted to giving priority to voter contacts over contact attempts, stressing that higher levels of engagement will be the key to victory this fall.

Officials declined to say what their current expenditure is but said they are finding ways to cut costs. For example, the RNC uses state representatives’ direct mail to reach voters. State lawmakers can use nonprofit postage stamps, which cuts postage in half, according to the campaign. Such an option isn’t available to super PACs, which are prohibited from coordinating directly with the candidates they support.

Some state Republican long-timers said that Trump isn’t a conventional candidate, and so it is possible a conventional ground game isn’t needed—but they would like to see something more, and fast.

“I don’t have heartburn—right now," a top North Carolina GOP official said. “It’s much more community based, as opposed to trying to get these large groups to show up."

Thousands of Trump Force 47 “captains" have been trained, the campaign said, with additional daily training taking place. There are occasional “Trump Force Tuesday" recruitment efforts where the campaign virtually trains volunteers and surrogates in the seven core battleground states. It has anywhere from a dozen to two dozen offices in the battleground states, with fewer in Western states because the concentration of voters they want to target is in only a handful of counties.

Efforts are also under way to staff up in states that the campaign says are in play, such as Minnesota and Virginia. The Biden campaign says it has seen no evidence of staffing by the Trump campaign in these states.

The Biden campaign typically aims to blanket states with grassroots efforts, which campaign officials say has long been proven effective in mobilizing voters.

“If you expect the election to be close, as we do, in all of these states, then you know that these tactics can swing thousands of votes," said Dan Kanninen, Biden-Harris campaign director for battleground states. “Building an effective and disciplined field operation, and being able to be in communities and build trust and relationships for months as we have, is absolutely essential. The Trump campaign simply isn’t doing it."

Republicans say they see the stakes the same way.

“It’s going to come down to every last vote," said Will Martin, member-at-large for the Republican Party of Wisconsin.

Write to Vivian Salama at vivian.salama@wsj.com