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46 days before Election Day, both parties are increasingly grappling with one question: Will their ground game move the needle?

The presidential election is shaping up to be a referendum on a litany of economic and social issues. But behind the scenes, it will also be a test of each party’s wildly divergent approach to canvassing and get-out-the-vote operations. These efforts, commonly known as “ground games,” have been crucial to the outcome of close races in the past — both George W. Bush and Barack Obama’s re-election campaigns are renowned in political circles for their fine-tuned operations.

This year, the campaign is a story of contrast: Democrats, coming off their self-imposed shift to virtual organizing in 2020, are returning to large-scale in-person efforts for the first time in eight years. Republicans, meanwhile, are pioneering a brand-new model heavily reliant on untested outside groups.

Most Democrats concede that, in hindsight, the decision to avoid in-person campaigning last time (a choice driven in part by an awareness of the awkward contrast it would have created with their heavily insulated standard bearer) ended up hurting them at the ballot box. “We did an enormous amount of good with the virtual tools at hand, but it left a lot of voters essentially uncontacted,” said Ben Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. “And I think that cost us votes.” (It’s worth viewing that explanation with some skepticism — it’s an easy out for the party’s broader misread of the electorate’s mood that year — but it likely did hurt some margins.)

Republicans, or at least their nominee, seem to have a different takeaway from 2020: Ground games don’t matter much. After Trump consolidated control of the Republican National Committee this spring, one of the first actions of his newly installed team was to scrap detailed plans for battleground state operations — a decision, the Dispatch reported at the time, that “originated at the top.”

Now, the Trump camp is outsourcing ground work to a network of third-party organizations — an approach without precedent in modern history. The Republican strategy has thus left a crucial portion of the campaign largely in the hands of a trio of outside groups: Turning Point USA, America First Works, and America PAC. The ability of the groups to work this closely with the Trump campaign was born from an Federal Election Commission advisory opinion in April. The decision significantly loosened coordination rules, drawing criticism from some Democrats. As Ashley Hayek, Executive Director of America Works, notes, there’s some element of irony there: It was a Democratic-aligned group, represented by the law firm of Democratic celebrity lawyer Marc Elias, that requested the opinion. “It’s funny when it was their side who asked for it.” Hayek said. “Our side is just going to make them regret asking for it.”

But the parties’ different trajectories since 2020 have inspired a quiet confidence among swing state Democrats. “This time we’re using every tool available,” said Wikler. “The striking thing about what we see from the GOP is that they're not mounting the same kind of ground game effort that they did in 2020 here. So it’s like the shoe is on the other foot.” A Democratic official in Minnesota, which Trump had promised to make competitive this year, echoed that sentiment, saying there’s an absence of Republican infrastructure that is like “nothing in recent memory.”

Even some Republicans share the skepticism, especially about Turning Point. In the run up to the 2022 midterms, the group, whose spending practices have raised eyebrows in GOP circles, boasted of its extensive efforts in Arizona, only for Democrats to sweep every competitive statewide race.

Still, some independent analysts warn against simply dismissing the groups’ efforts out of hand. Mark Green, a political science professor at Columbia University and author of “Get out the Vote,” which chronicled the history and efficacy of in-person canvassing, cautioned that the strategy is more untested than unworkable. “In some ways, the task that they are asked to do is a very doable task,” Green said “We just don’t know. We haven’t seen it face to face.”

One operative closely involved in one of the outside groups, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal dynamics, expressed confidence in the broader efforts and pointed to Pennsylvania as an example of their efficacy. “Democrats had three times as many [early] ballots as Republicans” before Election Day 2022, they said. “You're not seeing that this election cycle.”

Still, the terrain varies wildly among the seven swing states, and different states may present more of a challenge for upstart operations. Nevada, the smallest battleground state, has long been a bright spot for Democrats even in tough years. Armed with a formidable ground game operation, the party has frequently outperformed polling averages, most recently in 2022, when Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto defied most prognosticators’ predictions to win re-election. But this year, the drift of some working-class voters of color towards Trump has seemed to create an opening for Republicans.

Some Democrats believe the experimental Republican ground game is squandering that opening. Jim Manley, a longtime senior aide to the late Harry Reid, the Nevada senator who is widely credited with establishing Democrats’ operation in the state, argued Republicans are ill-equipped for the Silver State’s unique voters. “If Republicans think they can outsource get-out-the-vote operations in Vegas and win, they're going to be sorely mistaken,” Manley said.

Which party’s assessment proves true could have big implications for a question that hangs over political obsessives and casual observers alike: whether 2024 will be like 2016 and 2020. Both times Trump was previously on the ballot, he largely overperformed his polling. But the very real potential scenario in 2024 — a functioning Democratic ground game against an unproven Republican one — is a matchup unlike the last two election cycles. And it’s one of several factors making it tricky to anticipate polling errors.

“We should be aware of the polling errors from 2016 and 2020, but also not necessarily assume that those polling errors will repeat in 2024,” said Kyle Kondik, Managing Editor at Sabato's Crystal Ball, the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. Kondik, who recently wrote a detailed analysis of those errors, pointed out that polling this time has largely avoided the inflated Democratic leads of the past two cycles. “Part of what actually gives me a little more confidence in polling this time is just that the polling is reflecting a closer race,” he added. “That probably suggests that there's going to be less of a Democratic bias.”

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