Many Republican and Democratic strategists are openly skeptical of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign — except for its outreach to voters who rarely pay attention to politics.
The strategy to reach “low-propensity voters” is getting serious attention from political operatives, who say they’ve seen evidence that the unconventional outreach is both comprehensive and forceful. It’s enough, they say, to undercut the belief that Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, has a more effective get-out-the-vote operation, a potential difference maker in a race expected to be decided by as few as tens of thousands of votes.
The strategy includes media outreach, digital ads and mail, all focused on people who usually don’t vote but might be enticed to support Trump this year. And the campaign’s efforts are getting reinforcement from outside groups and local pols who also see an opening among those voters.
“I’m always skeptical about self-proclaimed Republican field efforts,” said Greg Speed, the president of America Votes, a progressive organization that focuses on voter turnout in liberal communities. “That said, we see a lot of evidence of Trump targeting low-propensity voters through other means. We’ve seen a number of mail pieces.”
Other Republicans, including strategists who are otherwise dismissive of the Trump campaign, say the outreach is focused not only on conservative-leaning voters in rural areas but voters in traditional Democratic communities, like Philadelphia and Detroit.
“It is real, it is smart and it is something they’re doing that they hope will make up for other shortcomings,” said one GOP operative in a battleground state. “Whether it will or not, who knows.”
The strategists emphasized that their praise shouldn’t be taken as an endorsement of field programs from Trump’s campaign and its conservative allies, including groups run or funded by Charlie Kirk and Elon Musk. Those efforts have been publicly criticized by GOP officials as underpowered and belated, and party operatives consider them separate from Trump’s overall effort to engage with low-propensity voters.
Some Democrats question whether the approach to reach these voters, which includes a voluminous mail program that reaches many deeply liberal Democratic voters, is really poised to help Trump on Election Day. They see it as an indication that Trump’s targeting is inefficient and wasteful.
“Spending time on the voters who could have voted for you in 2016 and 2020 and instead chose not to? Good luck with that,” said Eric Stern, a Pennsylvania-based Democratic strategist.
Democratic groups ranging from the Harris campaign to progressive organizations like Indivisible also say they’ve done extensive outreach to low-propensity voters over the last year and that their engagement efforts run deeper than anything the Trump campaign is doing.
But privately, some Democratic strategists concede that they’ve been impressed with the comprehensiveness and consistency of the Trump effort. That includes attempts from the candidate to reach voters who usually tune out of politics by going on programs that don’t normally feature political content.
Trump officials think that many Black and Latino men who are concerned about the economy are among these low-propensity voters, and those are demographics they think are favorable to them this cycle. Persuading just a small share of those voters to cast a ballot, they say, could make a big difference.
“We have been much more targeted [in our outreach] than Republicans have been previously,” said James Blair, the Trump campaign’s political director. “Four years ago, we just tried to generally drive up turnout, period. This time we’re just trying to turn out the right voters, not all voters, and we’re focused on expanding the turnout pool in a way that shifts the electorate in our favor.”
The message the Trump campaign delivers is often hyper-specific to issues that may resonate with those voters. In one mailer sent by the Nevada Republican Party, for instance, the GOP blamed Harris for rising gas prices in the state and said Trump would bring those costs down.
Trump officials say they’re not only focused on driving up turnout in rural communities dominated by Republican voters. The campaign is also engaging with voters in liberal cities, trying to either persuade them to back Trump or persuade them Harris doesn’t deserve their vote.
“No doubt we’re playing on their turf,” Blair said. “We’re not expecting to win all of the people, but if we shave off a few points here, a few points there, the net impact on likelihood of winning is very significant for us.”
Republicans leading similar outside group voter outreach efforts point to surges in registration among young men. Scott Pressler, who runs Early Vote Action, one of several new and largely untested voter-outreach operations taking the lead in battleground states, is specifically targeting low-propensity voters to make up for Trump’s suburban losses.
“The majority of the people we register are Gen Z new voters or voters that haven’t voted before,” Pressler said. Those groups are considered low-propensity voters.
Local Republican leaders have noticed the shift away from traditional campaign operations and toward outside groups targeting low-propensity voters.
“Our area is ripe for harvest here with lower-propensity voters, and turning them out has been our emphasis,” said Bill Bretz, chair of the Republican committee in Westmoreland County, located in western Pennsylvania.
Like other western Pennsylvania counties, Westmoreland County was traditionally a Democratic stronghold but has voted Republican in every presidential election since 2000.
After losses up and down the ticket in 2022 spurred a crisis within the Republican Party of Pennsylvania, party leaders at a state committee meeting shared with county chairs the number of eligible voters in their area that were not registered to vote. Party leaders urged them to close the gaps, Bretz said. For Westmoreland County, that was 44,000.
“So I put that number on a whiteboard, and now I have that hanging at every festival, county fair, whatnot, so that if someone walks by and sees it, they’re inclined to act.”
Two weeks ago, the local party registered a net increase of 300 Republican voters. Last week, it registered another 412 Republicans. Over three quarters were new voters, as opposed to party switches.
Jackie Kulback, who leads the Republican Party of Pennsylvania’s southwest region, said it’s on red areas of the state like hers to get Trump elected, and that win requires driving out new voters and registered voters who haven’t turned out in recent elections.
“We’re seeing a lot of low-propensity voters coming in saying, ‘I am absolutely voting this year.’ I know the Trump campaign, as part of their Trump Force 47, has been focusing on the low-propensity voters, and that’s been effective,” she said.
Chris Wilson, a veteran Republican pollster, said he would normally be skeptical about any campaign that emphasized outreach to voters who don’t normally cast a ballot. But Trump, he said, is different, citing the ability in both of his previous campaigns to turn out many voters who usually don’t participate in politics.
“It’s a completely unique scenario, which is what Trump brings to politics,” Wilson said.
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Alex Roarty is a reporter at NOTUS. Katherine Swartz is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.