The New Yorker:

Much of the ground game has been outsourced to Turning Point Action, which has given up on persuading swing voters and is betting it all on turning out MAGA diehards.

By Antonia Hitchens

I had been walking the streets of suburban Phoenix for hours and barely seen anyone else on foot. One of the few people I did encounter was a man holding a sign that read “I need ice I’m going to get heatsick again.” It was August, approaching a hundred and fifteen degrees, and I was with Jason Angel, a former marine who was volunteering with Turning Point Action, the grassroots political-advocacy group, to door-knock for Donald Trump. Angel’s goal was to talk to ten registered Republicans who hadn’t voted in the last Presidential election. There are more than two hundred and thirty thousand such Republicans in Arizona; in 2020, Trump lost the state by roughly eleven thousand votes. It was the first time a Democratic Presidential candidate won Arizona since Clinton did in 1996. (Before that: Truman, 1948.) Angel was consulting Turning Point Action’s iPhone app, which displayed a map leading us to the closest so-called low-propensity voters—high chance of voting Republican, slim chance of showing up. They were mostly not answering the door. Angel’s knee was screaming in pain, but he wanted to keep going. “I can hardly damn walk,” he said. “I’m going to have to get over to the V.A.”

In 2016, Trump won three battleground states by less than a point; the same was true for Biden in 2020. It didn’t seem unreasonable for Angel to hope that a few encounters at the margin would be worthwhile. During the stretches in between houses, he told me about Diana Walsh Pasulka, a scholar of religious studies who writes about people’s inclination to believe in U.F.O.s. We arrived at a house that looked promising: two cars were in the driveway, one of them a truck with a model of a .50-calibre bullet mounted on its front hood. “This guy’s my people right here,” Angel said. He made sure his veteran baseball cap was visible in the Ring camera. Then he turned to me and said, “Instead of going out and trying to convert people, let’s talk to folks who are like us.”

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