Operatives are worried the chaos will hurt Trump’s chances.
Spoofed
Things are so bad behind the scenes of Elon Musk’s political action committee (PAC) that it could tank Donald Trump’s chances of winning back the White House.
In interviews with NBC News, nine GOP canvassers and operatives involved with the project said that Musk’s America PAC has had issues with everything from sketchy data submissions to forcing its staff into a hurricane.
And the organizers trying to weather those disparate storms are not, the operatives suggested, equipped to handle them.
Last week, The Guardian revealed that there had been a spike in suspicious canvassing entries on Campaign Sidekick, the app America PAC uses to log voter contact phone calls and door knocks. Despite subsequent reporting revealing that paid canvassers were exchanging tips on how to “spoof” data, operatives who spoke to NBC expressed that it’s even worse than people realized.
After news of the suspect data went public, organizers subcontracted by America PAC began double-checking entries after canvassers submitted them, NBC‘s confidential sources said.
“Everyone gets an eyeball every few days,” one person familiar with the fraud-guarding effort said, adding that canvassers have been regularly fired for either not doing their jobs or submitting phony data.
“The PAC uses other analytical tools to identify potential anomalies,” the operative said, “and then issues physical audits off of the forensic audit.”
As experts have suggested, inconsistent or fraudulent data is harmful to campaigns because it can project a false sense of confidence in numbers that are not real — a bad situation made all the worse by issues entirely outside the PAC’s control.
Hurricane Party
Along with interviews about the data-spoofing going on in America PAC, other canvassers who spoke to NBC on condition of anonymity said that they were made to knock on doors even during the uber-powerful Hurricane Helene as it began making landfall in North Carolina at the end of September.
As Helene was brewing inland in the Southeast, canvassers north of Charlotte were told that even though they’d previously been instructed to make phone calls instead of physically knocking on doors, their manager informed them later in the day that they needed to go out into the storm.
“I’m knocking on people’s doors,” one of the canvassers said. “They’re looking at me like I’m crazy.”
Unsurprisingly, a lot of the subcontracted canvassers quit after that debacle — but according to another of NBC‘s higher-placed sources, nobody was forced to go out into the rain.
“Virtually the entire team was on the phones in the morning, but as weather allowed, a number of canvassers notified us they wanted to canvass,” the operative said. “Safety was always emphasized, with the team being instructed to stay inside if there was any question.”
Whatever the case may be, it’s clear that there’s a lot of chaos afoot inside Musk’s PAC — and in an already-chaotic election cycle, that’s not good news for Trump’s chances.
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