Team Harris is getting out the vote — what is Trump doing? 

With only weeks remaining in the 2024 presidential contest, Vice President Kamala Harris’s team is launching the single largest get-out-the-vote effort in modern history.  

Democratic insiders are betting that Harris’s record cash haul, surge in volunteer support and constellation of Democratic organizing superstars will be enough to overcome state polling that has tightened significantly in recent weeks. Even so, the Harris campaign now finds itself committing new resources to states once solidly in the vice president’s column — including Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada. 

Are these recent polling shifts indicative of a changing race, or are they to be expected in the closing weeks of a hotly contested, super-partisan presidential campaign? I spoke with some of Democrats’ top organizers to better understand the challenges and opportunities behind Kamala Harris’s expansive ground game. 

There’s no doubt Harris has the money and the numbers to field a historic voter engagement operation. Last week, a source close to the campaign estimated Harris surpassed $1 billion in fundraising, an astronomical sum given the short time she’s been a candidate. Harris has been pouring that cash into her battleground field operation since her first days at the top of the Democratic ticket, resulting in a professionalized field army that dwarfs Donald Trump’s scattershot operation. 

As early as July, Harris boasted “more than 260 field offices in swing states” including “more than 1,300 staffers.” That number has ballooned in the two months since. Harris’s field team now numbers “2,500 staff members located in 353 offices,” according to reporting out this week from the New York Times. Last week alone, the Harris team reported knocking on more than 600,000 doors and completing more than 3 million phone calls into swing states. That ground game is one reason Harris’s team is brushing off concerns about tightening polls. 

“We’ve opened the offices, we’ve built the teams, and now we’re mobilizing volunteers to go talk to voters,” Wisconsin Democratic Party Chairman Ben Wikler told me. “We’re running phone banks every day and door-knocking shifts every day. We know who the voters are that we have to talk to, and we’re flooding the zone with hundreds of thousands of direct voter contacts every single week.”  

Wikler says direct voter contacts in Wisconsin alone now number “in the millions,” with a focus on voters who are casting ballots for the first time. For Wikler, that means not only helping voters register and secure a ballot, but engaging those new voters on why they feel motivated in the first place. 

“We call it ‘persuade to participate,’” Wikler says. “We connect with them at the level of their values, whether that’s the freedom to make their own decision about abortion, issues around the economy, around price gouging. Once we connect on that level, then we start a conversation about making a plan to vote.”  

None of that nuance is present in Trump’s threadbare national get-out-the-vote operation, much of which his campaign has outsourced to untested third-party groups. That’s especially true in Wisconsin, where billionaire Elon Musk’s America PAC is paying up to $30 an hour for inexperienced volunteers. Musk’s effort has been riddled with problems since the beginning, the Washington Post reports, draining scarce GOP funds while offering producing results. 

Not even Republicans are convinced Trump’s on-the-cheap effort will work. As early as last year, some party insiders griped that “nobody wants to admit” the former president’s efforts are not yielding winning results. “That’s why we’re losing elections,” one veteran GOP strategist told NBC News.  

They aren’t wrong. Studies dating back to 2007 have shown that volunteer canvassers who join a campaign because they are highly motivated outperform even highly paid field mercenaries. That shouldn’t be too surprising: Volunteers who feel they are fighting for their values will work harder and care more about the outcome than canvassers simply in it for the paycheck. In their effort to leverage billionaire fortunes as an organizing force multiplier, Republicans have hired a wave of apathetic, disconnected canvassers.  

That’s a terrible way to win friends and influence voters. 

There’s no indication that Trump or the GOP have learned their lesson about the perils of discount organizing. That’s good news for Democrats, because Trump’s get-out-the-vote weak spot remains Harris’s best opportunity to win the White House in November.

Her team has already indicated they will be expanding field operations up until Election Day. Trump’s team has made no similar promise. That should terrify Republicans who have staked their political future on Trump returning to power. 

Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.