What Happened to GOTV?

So, here we are, almost two fucking weeks after that fucking election, and I’m still waiting for anyone on the blue team to explain not only why we lost, but in particular why we lost do badly in the so-called battleground states.

And if I hear one more Democrat who won a seat in Congress say that he or she doesn’t want to ‘point fingers’ at anyone connected to the Harris-Walz campaign, I might even be tempted in 2026 to vote for the GOP although please don’t take me seriously when I say something like that.

Within a week after Kamala replaced Joe at the head of the blue ticket, all I kept hearing about was how much money was pouring into the blue campaign, and how some thirty million people had signed up to do volunteer work over the next three months.

Thirty million people? Seriously, thirty million?

Back in 2020, Trump went around saying that he had an ‘army’ of fifty thousand ready to get out the vote and then patrol all the voting places to make sure that the count went right.

Want to compare fifty thousand to thirty million? Go right ahead.

And while you’re at it, don’t forget to recall the gazillion fundraising solicitations I received from Kamala asking, no begging me to send in enough dough to cover the costs of getting those thirty million volunteers out into the field.

Now you would think that a ground game for a national election would focus on the states which were considered states that neither side could guarantee the end result, right?

After all, New York State would deliver its 28 electoral votes to a Republican in the same way that Kansas would ever deliver its 6 electoral votes to the blue team.

You don’t need to run a GOTV effort in more than 40 of the 50 states, because thanks to gerrymandering and the ethnic mix of each state’s population along with the history and culture of any particular place, party voting patterns in most states don’t change very much over time.

But when both parties acknowledge that there are a handful of states which have swung back and forth between the two parties over the last twenty years or so, it stands to reason that those are the states where you better do a real, serious GOTV effort, or you might as well call it quits before you begin.

That being said, in this year’s contest the consensus was that the election would ultimately come down to how people voted in seven states: Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Caroline and Georgia.

Together, these states represented 93 of the 270 electoral votes which some candidate, either candidate needed to win in order to become Number 47 next year.

In 2020, Trump ended up winning 232 electoral votes, Joe’s total was 306. Joe won.

Joe also won 6 pf those 7 ‘battleground’ states, Trump winning only North Carolina by slightly less than 1.5% of the total state vote.

It should also be pointed out that in 2016, Trump won every one of those 7 states, which means that Joe flipped 6 of those must-win states four years ago.

Not only did Trump flip all those states from blue back to red this time around, but his vote total in all those states together represented a 6% increase over the 2016 total vote.

And what did the Kamala-Walz campaign manage to achieve this year in those all-important states? They actually lost all 7 states by a decline in total votes between 2020 and 2024 of — ready? — less than one-half of one fucking percent.

And this is what we got for sending them money to pay the expenses of 30 million volunteers who were going to walk around ringing doorbells or making phone calls to get out the vote?

This wasn’t a GOTV effort. This was what Grandpa would call a ‘gevalt’ (read: mess.)

I know, I know, it’s only another 18 months until we start gearing up for the next national campaign, and I really don’t believe that our Acting President, Elon Musk, will do anything except snag a whole bunch of government contracts for selling his Tesla cars.

But I would feel a lot better if someone would stand up (or go on CNN which amounts to the same thing) and say that he or she was responsible for this year’s GOTV campaign and fucked the whole thing up.