GOP canvassers have had trouble convincing Pennsylvanians to vote early. Trump’s rhetoric has convinced them early votes won’t be counted.
Manheim, Pa. – On Sundays, First Presbyterian Church of Levittown pastoral assistant and deacon Keith Elton is a little busy. But the free time he has on other days he spends knocking doors as a Donald Trump ground-game volunteer in Bucks County, one of the most competitive counties in the commonwealth. His getup here inside the Spooky Nook Sports Complex for Thursday evening’s “Make America Healthy Again” event tells his story: a gold-letter embossed Trump Force Captain ball cap, clerical collar, American flag shirt, and cross earrings.
This cycle, “Bucks County has more registered Republicans than Democrats, so I’m actually feeling really good,” an upbeat Elton tells National Review here in southeastern Pennsylvania ahead of the GOP ticket’s Dr. Phil–moderated panel with wellness advocate Calley Means and independent presidential candidate turned Trump surrogate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Thursday evening. “I wanted RFK Jr. to be his V.P.,” he says, explaining his presence here last night.
A look at the Bucks County website shows the GOP indeed had a narrow edge here as of data uploaded by August 30: 199,893 registered Republicans, 198,957 registered Democrats, and 83,512 registered voters who fall in the other category. (The voter registration deadline was October 21.)
Elton is optimistic that early vote returns look promising for Republicans here in Pennsylvania as Election Day nears. When it comes to early-voter-turnout methods, he thinks phone- banking is useless. Of the nearly 800 calls he’s made thus far, he has only actually spoken with 54 people. The real deal is door-knocking. And for the Trump campaign, low-propensity Republican voters are the whole ballgame. “In ’16 and ’20, I’m chasing Democrats,” says Elton. “Now, only focused on getting Republicans out the vote. If they all vote? Done deal.” He’s already hit 400 doors. “That’s why I get to wear the hat,” he says of his official Trump Force 47 ball cap.
Trump Force 47 volunteers comprise most of the GOP ticket’s official ground game this cycle. They aim to mobilize personal Republican contacts out to the polls, especially those who didn’t vote in 2020 or the 2022 midterms. Beyond this volunteer force, the GOP ticket is relying on a number of aligned groups, such as the Elon Musk–bankrolled America PAC, the Faith and Freedom Coalition, and Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point Action. While millions of dollars have been poured into this web of groups, GOP skeptics often worry privately that there are downsides to outsourcing a ground game to groups and vendors whose canvassers the campaign can’t control.
Speaking privately with NR, Republican operatives and some longtime Republican National Committee members warn that the GOP ticket’s strategy is high-risk, low-reward, and may not be able to compete with the historically strong Democratic turnout machine, as Jim Geraghty recently explained in these pages. Others wave away these concerns as being overblown. But the Democratic competition is stiff: Beyond raising more than $1 billion since ascending to the top of the ticket, Harris’s ground game includes “2,500 staff members located in 353 offices,” according to the New York Times.
No, a ground game alone can’t win or lose an election. Trump won in 2016 without a robust get-out-the-vote effort the same year Hillary Clinton was hailed for having had an extremely sophisticated ground game. But if the election is close and Harris wins by a hair, the finger-pointing will begin immediately, and the GOP ticket’s official 2024 turnout methods will near the top of the list.
The pre–Election Day presidential polls here and early vote numbers have Republicans feeling good about their chances. And speaking of turnout, attendance at Thursday night’s “Make America Healthy Again” panel was so high that organizers had to bring in boatloads of extra chairs and expand the event boundaries to accommodate the hundreds of folks who made the trek to last night’s event. Onstage here, Dr. Phil, RFK Jr., and Truemed co-founder Calley Means discussed how a Trump administration would help stop the “dumbing down of American children,” expose conflicts of interest in government health-regulatory centers, and more.
It’s this message that brings young former restaurant manager and Kennedy campaign staffer Cooper Deal from his home in Brooklyn, N.Y., down to Pennsylvania in these final days of the campaign, along with a group of other volunteer Make America Healthy Again – “MAHA,” for short – canvassers. After supporting Trump in 2016 and making the jump to Kennedy in 2024, he’s now working to help elevate both political figures’ messages here in the final stretch by juicing the Republican ticket’s early vote numbers in a Bucks County borough called Newtown.
One problem, he says, is convincing Republicans that their early votes will be counted. Deal’s door-knocking spiel in Newtown, Pa., begins: “Hi, I’m with the Donald Trump/Robert Kennedy Jr. alliance to Make America Healthy Again. We are here with some information about early voting in your area,” he tells NR. “And then the initial reaction is, oh, no, no, no, no, we’re not doing that” because of “what happened last time” in 2020, when Trump told his supporters that the election was stolen. People are “very cautious” about voting early, he says.
He maintains that on the ground here, almost every other house has a story about witnessing voter fraud firsthand four years ago. To reassure Republican-leaning prospective voters that the voting process is secure, he shows them a piece of paper with the address of the nearest polling site and tells them a camera monitors their local polling sites 24/7. He reminds them that Trump supports early and mail-in ballot efforts this cycle to better compete with the Democrats.
Other Republicans here in southeastern Pennsylvania are doing the persuading on their own time. “If I talk to people, I try to inform them of why I would vote for Trump, maybe I can sway someone,” says Trump voter John Kontir, who drove an hour from his home in to attend last night’s MAHA event with his wife Kelly from Coatesville, Pa. Chester County residents, they receive a lot of mailers from GOP Senate candidate Dave McCormick, “more so than Trump” and a “smattering for Harris.”
This post has been updated.