Biden was buoyed by a vast grassroots movement: the Trump era has seen a frenzy of political action, with thousands of newly motivated activists leading local political groups. Middle-class women gathered their Facebook friends to drink wine and make canvassing phone calls; disaffected Republicans waged a multimillion-dollar campaign to mobilize their peers. A weak fundraiser who ended the primary essentially broke, Biden shattered general-election fundraising records—his campaign hauled in $952 million, dwarfing the incumbent by more than $300 million—as liberals showered donations on him and the party's congressional candidates.

But Trump had his own army of enthusiastic supporters. His massive rallies—held at cavernous airport hangars and sports arenas with no social distancing and limited mask wearing—were not just aimed at flattering Trump's ego or creating images of enthusiastic throngs for local and national media. Republican National Committee (RNC) teams perched outside each event, registering new voters and creating a database of supporters. "People sometimes poohpooh the rallies and say there's really no campaign structural benefit to them," says Brian Ballard, a Republican lobbyist with close ties to Trump. But they allowed the campaign to "utilize the crowds that not only go, but the crowds that registered to go, and sometimes that number is five times the amount of folks that actually show up."

Trump's campaign also kept up its feld-organizing program through the summer, while Biden's team hung back out of safety concerns. The joint feld program between the RNC and the Trump campaign boasted 2.6 million volunteers, according to figures provided by the RNC. They made more than 182 million voter contacts—more than fve times what they did in 2016—and added nearly 174,000 new GOP voters to the rolls. Early voter-registration fgures in Florida, North Carolina and other states showed that Republicans had "essentially neutralized what had been a Democrat advantage" by mobilizing new voters, says John Podesta, who ran Clinton's failed 2016 presidential bid.

譯文由可可原創(chuàng)，僅供學(xué)習(xí)交流使用，未經(jīng)許可請勿轉(zhuǎn)載。