“I haven’t seen anybody.”
Ding Dong Ditch
Multi-hyphenate CEO Elon Musk has dug deep into his own pockets to get former president Donald Trump back into the White House.
In July, the Wall Street Journal reported that Musk had been pledging roughly $45 million per month to a new super-political action committee (PAC) called America PAC.
And after a rocky start, including Musk firing almost all of the organization’s vendors in an extremely characteristic move, the PAC has seemingly forgotten to actually canvass voters in key swing states to vote for Trump.
As the Associated Press reports, America PAC hasn’t made much of a showing in battleground states. Reports of America PAC canvassers were rare in two dozen interviews with activists and party officials.
“I haven’t seen anybody,” the Republican Party field director in Oakland County, Michigan, told the AP, referring to the PAC. “Nobody’s given me a heads-up that they’re around in Oakland County areas.”
“I don’t know what the PACs are doing,” GOP chair in Macomb County, Michigan Mark Forton added. “I don’t know if they are going door to door.”
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The number of door-to-door canvassers associated with the Musk-funded PAC is murky at best. According to Election Commission spending reports, the PAC has paid canvassing firms more than $14 million since mid-August.
Trump aides told the AP that they have an estimated 30,000 volunteer captains who were tasked with identifying target voters.
The America PAC is only one of several conservative action committees representing Trump in the field. The Trump campaign has outsourced essentially its entire ground operation to these committees, likely at least partially the result of recent changes affecting to US political campaigning laws.
In March, the Federal Election Commission issued a ruling allowing nonfederal commiteees to coordinate paid canvassing efforts in federal elections.
But America PAC’s operations appear to be pretty chaotic behind closed doors. Sources told the AP that the PAC had fired a Nevada-based canvassing company after paying it just shy of $2.7 million last month — a notable shakeup, considering we’re less than 50 days away from the election.
As a result, the PAC stopped canvassing in Arizona and Nevada over the past few days, as The Guardian reports.
Apart from canvassing, the PAC has been flooding North Carolina voters with door-hangers and mail pieces, the Washington Post reported last week, which paint vice president Kamala Harris as “radical” and “dangerous.”
America PAC has ramped up spending substantially since mid-August. Its almost $33 million in expenses have primarily gone to door-knocking and digital advertising, per WaPo.
But whether this money is being used effectively, especially considering the AP‘s most recent findings that canvassers are far and few between, remains unclear at best.
More on the America PAC: Elon Musk’s $160 Million Bid to Get People to Vote for Donald Trump Was a Complete Disaster
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