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YORK, Pa. — As Trump campaign volunteers Rachel and Chris Gottberg prepared to knock on doors in York, Pennsylvania, last month, their goal was to win over the infrequent voters that the campaign sees as key to victory in the battleground state.
Wearing red T-shirts emblazoned with "Trump Force Captain," they were among a handful of door knockers who had gathered in the Republican Party headquarters in this working-class city of about 45,000.
The couple said they were focused on newly registered voters and what political campaigns call "low-propensity voters" — people who don't show up every voting cycle and may even skip the presidential ballot.
The Trump campaign and its allies are putting an unprecedented focus on targeting these infrequent voters in the seven battleground states that could decide the Nov. 5 election against Democrat Kamala Harris, according to interviews with three dozen Trump campaign staffers, Republican county party chairs and donors.
This focus is a high-risk, labor-intensive strategy that could bring in a wave of new voters but could also fall short if their targets ultimately stay home, one Republican official and one academic expert warned.
"It's definitely a new focus that wasn't the case in 2020," Rachel Gottberg, 34, a door-knocking veteran of previous campaigns, told Reuters before heading off with her husband to hunt for voters in their car adorned with a large Trump campaign hood cover.
'We have to get them to the polls'
Candidates typically target both infrequent voters and swing voters in an effort to expand beyond their base. But Trump, more than in previous cycles, sees infrequent voters as critical. The target voters are largely rural, white and young, but also include a sizable contingent of people of color.
"We know they agree with us. We know they favor us, but we have to get them to the polls," James Blair, the Trump campaign's political director, told Reuters.
A New York Times/Siena College survey published on Sunday underscored the opportunity for the Trump campaign with less reliable voters. While Trump held a slight lead on Harris among all likely voters polled, 48% to 47%, he was ahead of her by nine percentage points, 49% to 40%, among those who did not vote in 2020, according to the poll.
The Trump campaign and its allies see turning out staunch supporters who are less inclined to go to the polls as critical to victory. The campaign is also targeting independents and other persuadable voters, a group they estimate to be 11% of the electorate in the battleground states.
"When you break down the numbers, you realize there's 300,000 low-propensity, conservative-leaning votes in Arizona alone," said Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for Turning Point Action, a pro-Trump group helping to mobilize these voters.
When "you're losing these states by 10,000 ballots or 20,000 ballots, you realize just how much potential there is if we do the work of engaging these voters beforehand," he added.
In contrast, the Harris campaign, flush with cash, appears to be mounting a broader-based effort for votes. While campaign officials declined to discuss their granular targeting, the approach appears to include courting women and other groups not committed to Trump with rallies and registration drives.
Jason Cabel Roe, a former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party, said the Trump campaign was smart to go after infrequent voters, who were credited with helping Trump win in 2016.
"A hallmark of Trump support is low-propensity voters that really didn't engage," he said.
Changing the makeup of the Trump coalition
The campaign is benefiting from the help of at least four pro-Trump organizations that are specifically focused on lower-frequency voters, Reuters found.
These include America PAC — a super PAC backed by tech billionaire Elon Musk — and Turning Point Action, a nonprofit led by activist Charlie Kirk that is planning to spend $108 million to hire hundreds of paid door knockers in battleground states.
The Republican Party and allied outside groups are also investing heavily to register new voters and to encourage mail-in voting, long a weak point for the party.
The Trump campaign is modeling its general election strategy on the one it employed in the Iowa Republican nominating contest last January, when an army of volunteer captains organized their neighborhoods and helped Trump win with 51% of the votes.
The campaign is working to train 50,000 captains like the Gottbergs in Pennsylvania, who said they had already knocked on 250 doors this election cycle.
Unlike past campaigns, these volunteers are not asked to cast a wide net. To start, they are given a narrow list of people in their neighborhood and asked to build a relationship with them through visits, calls and postcards.
By some measures, the Democrats appear to be building out a more robust get-out-the-vote machine.
For example, Harris's campaign says it has 1,600 paid staff across the battleground states, compared to the "hundreds" Trump's campaign has disclosed. In Pennsylvania, her campaign says they have 50 offices, double Trump's disclosed footprint.
Blair stressed that the Trump campaign was not at a disadvantage.
Trump is leaning heavily on outside organizations to boost turnout following new federal guidelines adopted this year that paved the way for campaigns to exchange data and coordinate more closely with them. Including such groups, there are 2,000 paid canvassers in the field, a Trump campaign official said on condition of anonymity, adding that there was a plan to canvass 15 million doors by Election Day.
Contributing: Jason Lange
