Trump Gambles on Outside Groups to Finance Voter Outreach Efforts

The Republican campaign for president is quietly being remade by new federal guidelines that empower big-money groups and threaten to undermine party control well beyond the 2024 election.

Former President Donald J. Trump’s team has enlisted some of these groups to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to knock on hundreds of thousands of doors across the country — saving the campaign significant money in the process.

But the Trump campaign is making a serious gamble in doing so, betting that these outside groups, which they do not directly control, can carry out their marching orders without accountability.

This transformation is a consequence of a surprise decision by the Federal Election Commission earlier this year that allows campaigns to coordinate their canvassing efforts with outside groups like super PACs. The change means that campaigns can outsource much of their costly ground game to entities that can take unlimited donations and raise money at a much faster clip.

Senior Republican Party officials fear that the decision — and the Trump campaign’s efforts — will lead to the party losing considerable control over get-out-the-vote operations, much as they have in the world of television advertising, where the scripts and strategies are often crafted by super PACs with their own ambitions and ideas.

“We have to accept it,” said Chris Carr, who helped oversee the Trump campaign’s field operation in 2020 and has long encouraged Republicans to offload those associated costs. “Outside groups are going to do more and more of this. But the cautionary tale for donors and for everybody else is: Are they actually doing what they said they’d do?”