Donald Trump’s campaign has limited ability to know whether their ground game operation is reaching target voters in battleground states, as the software being used needs fast internet service to properly track canvassers, according to multiple people familiar with the situation.
The Trump campaign this cycle is targeting so-called low propensity Trump voters, who are often in rural areas, as part of their bet that hitting those people who don’t typically vote but would cast a ballot for Trump if they did, could make a difference in a close election.
But the Trump campaign and the Elon Musk-backed America Pac, which is now doing an outsized portion of the Trump ground game, use a management app called Campaign Sidekick that struggles in areas with slow internet and means canvassers have to use an offline version.
The Campaign Sidekick app effectively forces canvassers who have less than 40mbps of internet – sufficient to stream 4K video – to use “offline walkbooks” which have no geo-tracking feature and do not always upload after a route is completed, the people said.
As a result, the Trump campaign and America Pac then have little way to know whether canvassers are actually knocking on doors or whether they are cheating – for instance, by “speed-running” routes where they literally throw campaign materials at doors as they drive past.
America Pac has tried to deter cheating by sending out teams of auditors to trail canvassers, but there is no way to directly audit every offline walkbook – which is particularly high because of the Trump campaign’s focus on hitting low propensity voters.
And even when canvassers legitimately complete a route offline, that data has sometimes failed to upload afterwards, the people said. Since the canvassers are paid by the door, they have to redo their work, wasting time and potentially annoying voters for harassing them twice.
“Maybe Elon Musk can give his canvassers a Starlink,” one political operative involved in the America Pac operation joked, referring to Musk’s satellite-based mobile internet router.
The Trump campaign has fielded complaints about Sidekick for some time, the people said. At least two other super Pacs, involved in doing ground game work on behalf of the Trump campaign in battleground states, have stopped using it for their own operations.
Those wider complaints include the app crashing during peak hours when there are many people using it at once, or tech glitches like the Google Maps preview in the app, which is there for canvassers to figure out their routes, being broken.
Campaign Sidekick’s has previously pushed back at the criticism, saying it has always been upfront about the limitations of offline walkbooks and recommends to clients to track factors that could indicate fraud, such as canvassers claiming they spoke to voters for than 25% of doors they hit.
And an executive at the September Group LLC, a major canvassing vendor that was contracted by America Pac to door-knock in Arizona and Nevada until last month, said they were happy with Sidekick even if they eschewed using offline walkbooks because of its drawbacks.
The Trump campaign’s co-campaign chief Chris LaCivita dismissed the complaints, saying in a statement: “Our canvassing apps work fine, and we’ve invested in new technology this cycle that is unmatched in politics to supplement our efforts. This is a clear hit job from a failed vendor who we’ll be sure to name and shame as soon as we finish winning this campaign.”
LaCivita did not address why their suspicion hinges on a vendor, given the fact that the grievances have come primarily from their own ground game partners. The statement also failed to address that the campaign has been aware of the issues for some time.
There have been complaints about Campaign Sidekick from other groups, as well. Turning Point Action, run by the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, told the Trump campaign they encountered so many difficulties that they would use their own app in Arizona and Wisconsin and parts of Michigan.
The complaints from Turning Point have centered on having to do everything manually. If a canvasser could only complete part of a door-knocking route, they complained, there was no way for the remaining doors to be automatically reassigned to another canvasser – those voters would simply not be reached at all.
The reason why the Trump campaign has stuck with the software is not entirely clear, apart from wanting continuity.
The Trump campaign took over the RNC in March and directed America Pac to use the app in part because the Trump team was already using it itself, and the thinking was it would be easier to analyze the data if it all came through the same system, a Trump official said.
But there have been political considerations as well. The Trump campaign decided not to use other platforms such as i360 Walk, partly as a result of distrust with its owners, the Koch brothers, who have opposed Trump in the past, one of the people said.
The Trump campaign also did not use software from Advantage Inc, seeing it as inferior and because the Florida governor Ron DeSantis used that platform for his get-out-the-vote operation during his 2024 Republican primary bid against Trump.
And the Numinar platform currently being used by America First Works, another Trump-allied Pac doing ground-game work, failed to gain traction with the RNC – for reasons that remain unclear – after it was pitched as an alternative to Campaign Sidekick earlier in this presidential cycle.
