geoff: Elon Musk's political efforts are one high-profile effort by trump allies. On that and what else to watch for with just two weeks remaining until election day, I'm joined by Amy Walter and Tamara Keith of NPR. The trump campaign has outsourced some of its get out the vote effort to third party super pac's including Elon Musk's.
The pitch seems to be reporting from reuters that the Elon Musk pack is having trouble hitting doorknocking goals and some canvasers have lied about the number of voters they have contacted. That seems problematic for the trump campaign to have these outside groups doing this crucial work. >> And a lot of these people are very good at getting attention.
But we don't know is whether they are very good at a ground game. The one case study we have of a campaign saying, I'm going to farm it out and we will have a super pac do it and we will focus on the things we can focus on -- that was Ron Desantis. It was a disaster.
It was not a good case study in what you want to do. There is a very open question about whether these efforts will work or whether Elon Musk is proving himself very good at burning millions of dollars. And we won't really know until the election.
The other thing I would say that is a counterbalance is that there are a lot of people that believe, including Democrats, that Donald Trump doesn't need a ground game because he is his own ground game. His voters are so motivated they will crawl overr glass to vote for him and you don't need a big doorknocking effort to get to them. Geoff: And that is a lesson of 2016, that Donald Trump can win with a disorganized campaign.
>> And even 2020 the polling suggested he was not going to hit the numbers he came up with. The reason we are paying attention to the ground game is not just because the race is close but because the kinds of voters that he does best with are the kinds that don't show up traditionally to vote. And they are harder to know not just who they are but how to motivate them.
Traditional doorknocking or sending or putting pieces of mail -- they don't necessarily respond to the same messages that your voter who turns out for every election will respond to. That takes a level of sophisticated targeting and messaging that you don't put together on the fly. Do I think that if Donald Trump loses it is because he outsourced his ground game?
I do not. Geoff: The Harris campaign is going all in trying to reach out to those to satisfy disaffected Republicans. What are you seeing on the ground and what does this suggest about their strategy?
>> I was traveling with Harris all weekend. She is making a concerted effort to speak to what you would say are Nikki Haley Republicans. This is an ongoing effofo including today with stops in all three of the blue walled states doing events in suburbs targeted at college-educated voters, Republicans, those that would have been Republicans if it weren't trump and trying to convince them to get over their discomfort and support her.
The reason the campaign is putting so much effort into this which in theory, in a normal year would feel like a long or and offed her thought is out vice president Harris, they are concerned she may not do as well with black voters, particularly black men or Latino voters and that Donald Trump is making some inroads into the traditional democratic base. What they are trying to do is run up the numbers in the suburbs where Donald Trump has struggled. There were tens of thousands of voters that voted for Nikki Haley after she dropped out.
>> In Chester county where the campaign was today with Liz Cheney this morning, after the Nikki Haley campaign was over, there was still a primary in Pennsylvania and she got about 10,000 votes in Chester county. Pennsylvania has a closed primary so only Republicans could vote in that primary. Theoretically there is 10,000 votes for somebody -- and the Harris campaign obviously hoping it is them, to pick up in the state decided by 60,000 or 80,000 votes.
Geoff: While I have you here, can we look at the latest poll? This is the Washington post poll of likely voters in battleground states. This shows a slight Harris lead.
How does the campaign feel about a poll like this? >> I think they feel about this like they do about all polls. The way she has been saying it is that this race is close.
They acknowledge it is close and it will take a lot of work to make it better than close for them. And she has said they are running like underdogs. She has said repeatedly that either you are running scared or stupid and they would rather run scared.
What they love to have better poll numbers? Of course they would. But, this race has been incredibly stable.
We are talking about all of these movements within the margin of error. They are statistically not significant. Geoff: When you dig deep into these numbers and other poles, -- and other polls, what do you see 15 days out?
>> It is a question -- who are the undecided voters? Overwhelmingly they are younger, a more diverse group of voters. They tend to be more heavily female and on paper they would look like Democrats accept they are also attending to be more economically sensitive and worried about the economy.
Which is why when you see the Harris had running the most, it is talking about the economy, the middle class economy and calling out Donald Trump for being for billionaires and not regular people. She has a lot of different messages to different groups but if you are talking about who are the last bastion of swing voters, undecided voters, the economy and being able to sell her on the economy or less than Donald Trump's advantage on that is really the key they believe. Geoff: You are with the Harris campaign in Nebraska's second congressional district to reiterate how closely this election is >> This is known as the blue or purple dot.
Of the swing states, if Harris were to win the blue wall of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin machine would be at 260 nine electoral votes, one shy of what is needed to win the presidency. And that is where Omaha comes in. The Harris campaign ground game -- they have three offices there.
There is also a competitive house race there. But they have volunteers -- I was watching them phone bank and they were chasing ballots. And there is also a kind of quirky grassroots effort that has sprung up with people putting blue dots in their yards , more than 10,000 signs have been made, many with blue spray paint, and Republicans responding with red pac-man things to eat the blue dot and also a big red state of Nebraska.
It is fun to see a place where they believe their vote matters and they are incredibly politically engaged and it is not super toxic. Geoff: Tamara Keith and Amy Walter, thank you both so much. Online on tiktok, Lisa Desjardins has been counting down to election day giving us a fun and insightful fact each day.
Reporter: Only 15 people have become president after being vice president.
