Coop Scoop Special Election Edition #8. The Harris Ground Game Dwarfs Trump

In a tied election turnout is means everything and Harris has the edge

November 1, 2025

ByMarc Cooper

Please stop biting your nails and mixing Xanax into your cereal over the election. Please stop reading and worrying over the polls – they are not going to change more than a point or two and they will not tell you who will win the election. They mean something but not much.

You are allowed to be nervous….but there are some very good reasons that are not immediately visible that makes Harris a lot more likely to win rather than lose. 

More about the specifics in a few minutes down the page – but here’s the tease: The Harris ground network is mammoth and activated while Trump’s is anemic and floundering. He spent Thursday in New Mexico where he has a .01% chance of winning, while Harris and her allies were blanketing Wisconsin and then Arizona.

The only action that counts over the next 5 days is turnout, turnout and more turnout.  And while social media might make some impact, using your personal and community human social networks are much more effective. 

You must talk to your friends, neighbors, club members, and anybody else you know and ask them to reach out to THEIR networks. Nothing in campaigning, as difficult as it is, can be more effective than person to person contact.  If you don’t live in a swing state, find somebody in your own network who does and ask them to gin up their folks this weekend.

If you are isolated in this sense, volunteer as a canvasser either for the national ticket in swing states. In blue states, there are more than 15 toss up congressional races where you should be involved or at a minimum donate directly to the candidate.

If you can’t walk a lot, no problem. Volunteer for a phone banking operation that should be easy to find.

So, let’s start with some of that optimistic news.  Early voting across the country is showing a 10-12% gender gap with women out voting men and suggesting the abortion issue is far from fading.  The women’s vote itself could beat Trump – especially as his campaign persists in its current mode of dissing women and celebrating “masculinity” with JD Vance acting as Secretary of Misogyny while Tucker Carlson is toasting his testes and sniffing his armpits..

Early voting trends might not hold up through the election but are off to a pretty good start. Take it from one of Musk’s biggest Trump Toadies on X/Twaddle.

But what’s this secret that most polls cannot see and TV news isn’t covering?   It’s the vaunted ground game that is talked a lot about but never really reported.

And the short sum of it is that Harris has built the most extensive ground operation in American electoral history – yes, bigger than Obama’s that was mostly online.  Trump has no such thing and as impeded as he is, he thinks mouthing off on TV as much as possible is enough for him to win.

His dominating the news for the last 10 days drives Democrats crazy, but I think the more the nation sees an unhinged Trump, the better. Let his ugliness shine!  His TV appearances, I would argue, consolidate his loon base, but win no new votes and alienate the middle.

A whiter shade of orange

Under the radar, while Trump is in the TV green rooms touching up his makeup and fine tuning his orange glow, literally thousands of Harris canvassers are working like crazy talking personally to voters. Nothing works better.

Indeed, the Harris campaign is so confident in their field work they are deploying a mass of workers in North Carolina –a state if she wins will be a KO for Trump and that Democrats have not won in 30 years.

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post spent some time in NC and came back awe struck by what he was seeing:

“Nearly 100 Harris staffers are organizing four canvasses per day on each of 32 college campuses in the state. Last weekend saw a “Souls to the Polls” effort with more than 100 Black churches getting parishioners to the polls to vote early. Campaign surrogates have flooded historically Black colleges and universities. The campaign coordinates with civic organizations to offer voters rides to voting places.”

“The field effort is coordinated with paid advertising, of course. The Harris campaign has been on the airwaves here for a year; for Trump, it has been the last few months. Black radio stations have been saturated with ads. Low-propensity Democratic voters will have gotten on average eight pieces of mail this cycle — low-propensity Black voters will have received 10 to 12 — and each will have received between two and six phone calls from volunteers and at least one in-person visit.

Forty thousand volunteers have signed up since Harris became the candidate, on top of those who were already volunteering for Biden. The Harris campaign has been running four shifts of daily canvassing here — at 9 a.m., noon, 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. — in which hundreds of volunteers knock on thousands of doors. Last week, campaign volunteers knocked on more than 100,000 doors and made more than 1.8 million phone calls in North Carolina alone. Comparable efforts are underway in every swing state.”

More from the Post: “In Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia, there is at least a 10-point gap between men and women in the early vote, according to POLITICO’s analysis and data from the University of Florida’s United States Election Project.”

Trump meanwhile has a ground game that is a train wreck.  Or, better, a ghost train. He’s been too busy preaching to the choir in big rallies while peddling gold tennis shoes and $100 trading cards.  He forgot along with his supposed two “adult” campaign chiefs to build, um, a field operation.  Those advisors were instead building their bank accounts and paying out overpriced amounts to contractor buddies.

It's only been a week or so that Trump deputized Elon Musk to take on this turnout task (insert laugh track here). That Musk is clearly having some sort of psychotic break is of no concern to the Chief Psychopath. They’re simpatico bros.

Yes, Musk is pouring tens and possibly hundreds of millions into the Trump coffers but most of that money is spent on commercials that no longer have much relevance.

Musk kicked off his ground turnout effort with his now infamous bribes of $100 to registered voters and a “lottery” of $1 million a day to one “lucky” individual– with winners not surprisingly being people close to the inner contracting of the campaign. Some luck!

That brilliant move has landed Musk in a Federal investigation and an upcoming hearing on violation of campaign laws, one that will be held in front of a Federal Judge. He was supposed to appear in a Philly court Thursday as the local DA sued him.  Musk had it moved to the federal courts but he’s still quite vulnerable.

But a report a day or so go reveals the essence of the slapdash, half assed operation being run by Musk apart from the bribery scheme.

He hired workers from his other companies (who cannot refuse the billionaire boss) to be shipped out to swing state Michigan to canvass.

They were not told they were canvassing for Trump which came as a shock to some.  They were transported like pigs in U-hauls with no seats, And were told if they did not meet their quotas they would have to pay their own hotel rooms!

Milbank:

“The] operation has floundered. A quarter of the door-knocks done by Musk’s paid workers are reportedly suspected of being fake in some battleground states — who knew that $20-per-hour hired guns might not be as dedicated to the cause as passionate volunteers? — and the operation has failed to meet its (relatively low targets.”

One Musk-hired worker told Wired magazine:

 “I was in shock and disbelief,” says a paid door knocker flown to Michigan to help turn out the vote for former president Donald Trump on behalf of Elon Musk’s America PAC.

In Michigan, canvassers and paid door knockers for the former president, contracted by a firm associated with America PAC, have been subjected to poor working conditions: A number of them have been driven around in the back of a seatless U-Haul van, according to video obtained by WIRED, and threatened that their lodging at a local motel wouldn’t be paid for if they didn’t meet canvassing quotas. One door knocker alleges that they didn’t even know they were signing up for anything having to do with Musk or Trump.”

The next five days are going to be nerve wracking.  If Trump wins you will have plenty of time to sit around and be numb.  But he’s not going to win if we put our shoulder to the wheel and help bring out what I am now calling the “unmotivated.” 

Shake off your gloom. Motivate yourself for the next few days and spread the word that if we vote, we win. We are not going to allow a convicted criminal, a sexual predator, a phony con man who is mentally, socially and politically impaired and who aspires to dictatorship to become President of the United States. Anyway, if it makes much difference to you, the final national poll out Friday has Harris ahead 49-48 nationally. Let’s make the final vote tally 53-47. ++

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