By David M. Drucker, John McCormack, Charles Hilu, and Grant Lefelar, The Dispatch, June 21, 2024
Pro-Trump Outside Group to Boost Nevada Ground Game
The Republican Leadership Fund, an outside group helmed by a veteran Republican field operative, is aiming to buttress the GOP’s threadbare ground game in Nevada: It plans to deploy more than 100 paid and contracted staff to knock on doors and turn out votes for the party’s 2024 ticket.
But in a twist—and in an effort this super PAC may export to additional battleground states—it plans to exclusively target “non-partisan” voters. Nevada has seen an explosion of voters unaffiliated with the Democratic or Republican parties. Chris Carr, the GOP strategist running the group, has concluded thousands of such voters are ripe for persuasion, based on extensive polling and data-analytics modeling. In a state where elections are often decided by a hair, that could be a difference-maker.
In 2020, Carr did double duty as political director for the Republican National Committee and Donald Trump’s reelection campaign, and previously ran voter turnout operations for the RNC. Earlier this week, he shared his plans for Republican Leadership Fund with Dispatch Politics. The program, Carr said, will accelerate in September; is budgeted to spend roughly $2 million to $3 million; will include direct-mail and text-message appeals; and will target voters who prefer Republican policies, even if they dislike the Republican Party.
Similar to a strategy Carr leaned on during his RNC days, canvassers will be deployed to designated communities and remain there through Election Day. This approach breeds familiarity with neighborhoods, and the voters who live there, and often yields more results than a mercenary door-knocker who is just passing through. Why is Carr focused on turning out unaffiliated voters?
Possibly because of a successful 2018 ballot initiative that uses the Department of Motor Vehicles to automatically register Nevadans to vote, the state’s 668,000 “nonpartisan” voters as of May 1 outnumbered both Democrats (602,917) and Republicans (570,283.) Combined with Democrats’ historic voter registration advantage over the Republicans shrinking significantly, nonpartisan voters could hold the key to Joe Biden and Trump’s fall fortunes. In 2020, Biden defeated his predecessor in the Silver State 50.06 percent to 47.67 percent.
That the Republican Leadership Fund is active at all, concentrating on any voting bloc, is a significant development.
As Dispatch Politics previously reported, the Trump campaign and the RNC have lagged behind the ground game fielded by Team Biden and the Democratic National Committee. The former president is finally raising money at a healthy clip and beginning to catch Biden in the race for resources that might fund a voter turnout operation. But Trump has told several Republican operatives that he prefers funding litigation to prevent Democrats from “cheating,” rather than investing in voter turnout, sources tell us.
So now, even though the Trump campaign has the money, the former president may still rely on outside groups—like the Republican Leadership Fund and others—to shoulder field duties for the GOP’s 2024 ticket. Meanwhile, in Nevada, where Biden is on his heels and Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen is up for reelection, Democrats also are looking beyond their base, wooing independents and soft partisans—part of a massive spend that is financing 1,000 paid staff and 200 field offices across multiple battleground states.
Donna West, a grassroots organizer for the Nevada Democratic Party, told Dispatch Politics in May that her door-knocking this summer and fall will include appeals to unaffiliated voters and persuadable Republicans, especially suburban women. One issue that pops with this cohort, West told us during state Democrats’ biennial convention, is abortion rights: “I’m not just going to D doors anymore.”