Swing-state playbook

Inside the swing-state playbooks

In the key battlegrounds, GOP hopes are riding on the sheer force of Trump's personality. Democrats are counting on a cutting edge field operation.

By Kyle Cheney and Katie Glueck

Republicans will rely on the sheer force of Donald Trump’s personality to tap into deep-seated voter anger. Democrats are counting on a superior field organization to serve as Hillary Clinton’s firewall.

Interviews with state party chairs in the 11 critical battleground states that will likely decide the general election reveal the two major parties expect to employ vastly different playbooks for the November campaign, each adapted to — and shaped by — the presence of polarizing and historically unpopular nominees at the top of the ticket.

“His job is to be Mr. Trump,” said Rob Gleason, the chairman of the Pennsylvania Republican Party. “His appeal is very different than a normal politician. Usually, when we have rallies for people, we prepare weeks in advance. All he has to do is announce three days ahead of time he’s going to be somewhere and a huge crowd shows up. It always energizes people.”

Gleason’s sentiments were echoed by GOP chairs across the swing states, from Colorado to Virginia to Michigan. They view Trump as a lightning rod for the anger of economically struggling Americans — particularly the white working class — and, despite his flaws, they can envision him causing a dramatic break from conventional voting patterns that will carry him to victory in November.

Publicly, at least, they insist they aren’t worried about reports of fundraising shortfalls or Trump’s dismissal of the need for sophisticated data analytics. Leave the back-end operations like field organizing and data targeting to the state parties and Republican National Committee, they say.

“Quite frankly, the people who know how to win elections in the state of Florida are the people who have been winning elections in the state of Florida,” said Blaise Ingoglia, chairman of the state GOP. “[In 2012], we had people up in Massachusetts telling the people in the state of Florida how to win elections here … We know how to win the elections here in the state of Florida. It’s a lot easier to plug into the stuff we’re doing.”

Deployed the right way, Trump’s force-of-nature persona could help flip some long-blue states toward the GOP, others said.

“I think if he invests in Michigan and shows up in our state, he will do very well,” said Ronna Romney McDaniel, chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party (and niece of 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney). “We haven’t had a candidate actually run a robust campaign in Michigan where they’re showing up post-convention.”

Democratic state party leaders, on the other hand, tend to express confidence that their state-of-the-art field organizations will carry Clinton to victory.

“I think we are way ahead,” said Martha Laning, chairwoman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. “We have over 50 field organizers in the state of Wisconsin. Our entire ticket is part of our coordinated campaign.”

“Democrats are far more organized than Republicans are,” added Ohio Democratic Party Chairman David Pepper. “We have a very good operation we built that will merge into the coordinated campaign -- over 100 staff on the ground.”

While Democratic Party leaders described frequent, sometimes daily, communication with the Clinton campaign, Republican Party chairs were more likely to describe weekly or twice-monthly calls with the Trump camp. They expressed optimism that the frequency of communication will increase as the general election got underway.

“I can call him,” Gleason said of Trump. “He’ll call me back if I call him. He doesn’t have a lot of people that he’s talking to. It’s a small staff, and I think Hillary has 1,000 people. He’s relying on us.”

GOP leaders repeatedly described Trump’s winning coalition this way: disaffected coal workers in regions like southeast Ohio or southwest Virginia, struggling blue collar workers in industrial southwest Pennsylvania or suburban Michigan, combined with veterans, the bulk of traditional rank-and-file Republican voters – and a share of Democratic voters from minority groups who typically don’t vote GOP.

They expect animus toward Clinton will ultimately outweigh any discomfort with Trump, and insist that he is likelier to corral wayward Democrats than Clinton is to peel off disaffected Republicans.

“Call them whatever you want, Reagan Democrats, union Democrats — there’s a lot more opportunity to bring those Democrats into the fold than Hillary Clinton ever has at bringing even moderate Republicans into her fold,” said Iowa GOP Chairman Jeff Kaufmann.

Democrats are likewise convinced that moderate Republicans will desert the party en masse, repelled by the extremes of Trump’s rhetoric.

“I think some Republicans are also going to vote for Hillary. Trump is just too offensive,” said Patsy Keever, the North Carolina Democratic Party chairwoman. “You don’t know what he’s going to do, you can’t trust him with the decisions of the country. It’s not a game.”

One area where party officials on both sides of the aisle were in agreement: the two nominees would be competing among an electorate that’s more diverse than it’s ever been. More than half of the nearly 20 chairs interviewed in both parties expected a sharply higher Hispanic turnout.

“We need to appeal to nontraditional Republican voters — the Asian community, Hispanic community, African Americans, Indian Americans have a huge population in Northern Virginia and Richmond,” said Virginia GOP Chairman John Whitbeck. “We’ve got to win those groups. That’s the coalition.”

On the GOP side, that challenge has crystallized over the past week. Trump’s campaign has been hammered in the wake of Trump’s racial attacks against an Indiana-born judge of Mexican descent, fueling Democratic confidence that his polarizing rhetoric will send Hispanic voters into their tent in droves.

“Every time he shows his face he gets us more votes,” said Keever, who like all the chairs was interviewed prior to the mass shooting in Orlando. “He galvanizes Democrats and just other people, who are not Democrats, who are unaffiliated or Republicans even. There’s just so many people who just cannot stomach his lack of respect.”

That’s a harrowing prospect for a Republican Party whose presidential ticket will be led by a candidate who has shredded a post-2012 GOP playbook that called for a more tolerant and inclusive approach toward minority voters. But some GOP leaders believe their recent outreach efforts could insulate them.

“We have been in the communities a lot earlier and with a very high concentration on Hispanic communities, minority communities, engaging in Venezuelan communities, Cuban communities, Puerto Rican communities, Haitian communities … faith-based communities within those communities,” said Ingoglia, the Florida chairman.

“A lot of the Hispanic communities here in the state of Florida, they themselves, their parents or their grandparents have fled regions or countries that have been oppressive,” he continued. “What’s going to resonate with them … is that a Hillary Clinton presidency is going to turn this nation into something that more closely resembles the country that they fled from.”

Colorado GOP Chairman Steve House, who predicted his state could hinge in part on 300,000 to 600,000 Hispanic voters, said the state party has been working aggressively to engage the Latino community in the state, with an outreach and ground operation underway. He also pointed to GOP Congressman Mike Coffman’s outreach efforts -- Coffman learned Spanish and engaged in a relentless effort to court Hispanic voters during his competitive 2014 reelection bid, and House suggested the effort could be a template for courting those voters in 2016.

In a race featuring two candidates with high unfavorability ratings, though, the responses from party chairs on both sides suggested that they were more comfortable attacking the opposition than making an affirmative case for their own presumptive nominee. In some cases, they ignored the race altogether, or framed the presidential match-up as a referendum on local issues.

In Pennsylvania, Gleason cited scandals that sank the state’s treasurer and attorney general, as well as the indictment of Rep. Chaka Fattah. In Virginia, Whitbeck repeatedly invoked Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Clinton ally who is facing a federal investigation regarding 2013 campaign contributions.

“Hillary Clinton is not popular in Michigan … We had a governor like that in Jennifer Granholm,” said Romney McDaniel, referencing the state’s last Democratic governor, who left office in 2011.

She credited the state’s current governor Rick Snyder for engineering an economic turnaround. “Michigan is on the comeback but our memories are long and we remember what it was like to suffer through bad economic times in our state … There is a recognition that that could happen again.”

Michigan Democratic Party chairman Brandon Dillon scoffed at the analysis.

“Whatever Ronna’s putting in her lemonade, I’d like some of it,” he said. “The reason Michigan’s economy has turned around is because President Obama’s administration saved the auto industry …This election is not going to be a referendum on Jennifer Granholm. It’s going to be a referendum on Rick Snyder.”