


There are real reasons to wonder whether Donald Trump’s campaign, despite doing well in the polls of late, may come up short in key states. The ground game may not matter in a lopsided race, but in state after state, the polling margins right now are the sort where the superior get-out-the-vote (GOTV) operation could matter.
As Jim Geraghty has detailed, “the Trump campaign’s strategy of effectively outsourcing its get-out-the-vote operations to Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point Action and Elon Musk’s America PAC” is very unproven, and many campaign veterans are worried. That could matter a lot because, as Audrey Fahlberg reports, the Trump GOTV effort in the crucial state of Pennsylvania will depend heavily on activating voters who don’t normally show up at the polls.
But outside of the MAGA trifecta of Trump, Kirk, and Musk, there’s another big operation in the field getting less attention: Americans for Prosperity Action, the political arm of Americans for Prosperity. AFP Action, the libertarian-leaning, free-market super PAC of the Charles Koch network, hasn’t endorsed in the presidential race, after backing Nikki Haley in the primary. It’s not focusing its messages on the White House. But it has endorsed Republican candidates in seven Senate races, including most of the key ones still in play: Dave McCormick in Pennsylvania, Mike Rogers in Michigan, Eric Hovde in Wisconsin, Bernie Moreno in Ohio, Tim Sheehy in Montana, and Sam Brown in Nevada (its other Senate endorsement is Pete Ricketts in the Nebraska special election). The AFP network is also involved in 44 House races and overall is engaged in nearly 650 races across the country.
According to AFP Action, it is closing in on a million doors knocked for McCormick in Pennsylvania, as part of a broader outreach of 2.3 million voter contacts (counting phone calls), as well as 636,000 doors knocked for Hovde in Wisconsin (and 1.4 million contacts), 665,000 doors knocked for Brown in Nevada (and 1.2 million contacts), and 212,000 doors knocked for Rogers in Michigan (and over 500,000 contacts).
Overall, across door-knocks and phone contacts, the AFP-world campaign has reached over 11 million voters nationwide, including 1.9 million contacts for Moreno in Ohio and 1.7 million for Sheehy in Montana.
AFP Action’s House targets also include swing districts in key presidential states such as Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, as well as Colorado, Iowa, New Mexico, Ohio, Virginia, New Hampshire, Connecticut, New York, and California. The scale of its engagement in Michigan goes into the state legislature as well. And with a week left in the campaign, it plans to keep going.
That could matter, and not just in the races AFP Action is targeting. It could also end up helping Trump in spite of remaining at arm’s length from him and his election. Ticket-splitting and abstentions still exist, so Republican GOTV at any level isn’t a one-to-one relationship with the rest of the ballot. And the sorts of voters Trump may especially need to reach by GOTV operations — low-propensity voters who may not be traditionally Republican voters — are not the typical target for groups such as AFP Action, which is as interested in persuasion of regular voters as it is in GOTV. But it is at least likely that voters who turn out for McCormick, Rogers, Hovde, or Sam Brown are a good deal likelier to support Trump than to support Kamala Harris. And in what may yet be extremely close races for the White House, the Senate, and the House, every voter counts.