Elon Musk’s Pennsylvania Playbook

Marshall Miller has been canvassing in the crucial and vote-rich regions of eastern Pennsylvania for years. A leader in the local Democratic Party in his hometown of Lancaster, Miller is used to crossing paths with his Republican opponents while out knocking doors. Both sides keep it polite — maintaining a respectful distance if they both happen to arrive at the same house at the same time.

This year, though, it has been lonelier on the sidewalks of the Keystone State. Miller says that there has been scarcely a Republican door knocker in sight lately and that remains true with just hours to go before the polls close.

“Honestly, it feels kind of bizarre,” Miller said when he was on his way to Delaware County for another afternoon of canvassing. “Usually, I would see them and nod or say ‘hi’ or something, but I have knocked on a fair number of doors at this point and haven’t seen them around at all.”

The lack of evidence of a Republican ground operation in Pennsylvania and in many of the swing states comes as the Trump campaign has attempted a novel approach to its get-out-the-vote strategy: relying almost entirely on America PAC, a super-PAC that is largely funded by Elon Musk, who has donated more than $120 million to elect Donald Trump this year.

That effort has been plagued by a seemingly endless series of stories attesting to its mismanagement and lack of focus. Wired reported that canvassers in Michigan affiliated with America PAC were hired from out of state without being told their job was to knock on doors on behalf of Trump; once they arrived, they would be driven around in the back of a seatless U-Haul van, where they were told that unless they met their canvassing quotas, they would have to pay for their own lodgings and airfare without compensation for their work.

Last month, The Guardian reported that a quarter of the door-knocks Musk’s canvassers said they had completed were flagged by an auditor as fraudulent, as the PAC’s foot soldiers were found to be not near the location of the homes they were supposed to have visited; one was even logging door-knocks while sitting at a nearby restaurant. America PAC has been run by a political-consulting firm managed by Phil Cox, a prominent Republican operative who was involved in a similar super-PAC-run canvassing effort on behalf of Florida governor Ron DeSantis in the Republican primaries before DeSantis flamed out in the Iowa caucuses. After Cox was brought in over the summer, the super-PAC terminated its relationship with the vendors who had been working with the PAC previously and brought in vendors that are affiliated with Cox.

“I think it is just an absolute joke,” said one former DeSantis campaign official. “There is so much dysfunction to it. There are like three new articles every day on how awful it is, and it seems like just a cash cow for the people that are running it. If Trump wins, it won’t be because of anything these guys are doing.”

In October, Musk hijacked the X handle @America from its previous owner in order to promote his latest project. Pinned to the top of @America’s profile, just below its mission statement (“PAC Founded by @ElonMusk to support candidates who champion Secure Borders, Sensible Spending, Safe Cities, Fair Justice System, Free Speech and Self-Protection”), are options to submit an application to be a paid canvasser at $29 to $30 an hour. Experienced canvassers, who are usually volunteers, say that is a much higher wage than usual for the work.

Those are not the only ways that Musk has been willing to spend his money. In October, he announced he would give $47 to everyone who convinced even one registered swing-state voter to sign a petition saying they supported the First and Second Amendment to the Constitution. The project was a way both to get potential voters to register without violating the federal law that forbids paying people to register outright and to identify potential Trump voters. A few weeks later, Musk upped the giveaway to $100 for voters in Pennsylvania.

Then Musk went even further, announcing that he would award $1 million every day to one random petition-signer. This caught the attention of Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner, who sued, arguing that it amounted to running an illegal lottery. Musk’s lawyers pushed to have the case moved to federal court, and on Thursday, a federal judge put the case on hold before remanding it back to state court a day later.

While canvassing operations tend to be pretty open about their work, since they are often volunteer-driven and involve face-to-face communication out in the open, America PAC has been buttoned up about its approach. The group has no real physical presence in the communities in which it operates, and a spokesperson would only say that it’s pushing mail, text messages, digital outreach, and door-to-door canvassing in its effort to elect Trump. The spokesperson admitted that the secrecy was unusual but added, “You pointing that out is not going to change our approach.”

Musk’s initial foray into electioneering may have been chaotic, but high-ranking Republican operatives and Trump campaign officials say that his utility to them has been significant nonetheless. It has been just over two years since Musk bought Twitter and renamed it X, and in that time, a social-media site known for being the meeting space for liberals and the media and a place where elite narratives could take hold has taken on a more right-wing character, while still remaining the digital campfire for beltway journalists and the people they cover.

“He is definitely trying to have an impact on the election; there is no doubt about that,” said Joe Trippi, a longtime Democratic operative who is building his own social network, called Sez Us, to act as a counter to X. “He just said that CNN should be called ‘the Disinformation News Network’ and he has 200 million followers. How could that not have an effect?”

Trippi pointed out not only that Musk has enormous personal reach, which he uses to amplify positive messages about Trump and spread negative ones (including some falsehoods) about Democrats — but also that the X platform itself now compounds those effects. Anyone who clicks on the algorithmically controlled “For You” tab on the site is likely to see multiple posts from Musk himself, accompanied by viral posts that skew Trumpian (for instance, clips depicting a country overrun by migrants and criminals).

Trump-campaign officials have looked on with amazement as messages that they struggled to call attention to, such as J.D. Vance’s visit to the border, suddenly go megaviral online thanks to Musk’s boost. The help is even more appreciated, they say, since under the previous regime of the website, many conservatives felt that their voices were being censored or suppressed.

“It’s amazing,” said one Republican operative close to Trump. “He’s engaging in politics in a way that no one in that kind of position has really done before, and he is hitting all of the pro-Trump and anti-Kamala notes you could ask for and making things go viral left and right. It’s not even that he is the owner of the site; it’s the fact that he is engaging in a way he never did. Twitter, or X, or whatever you call it, is still the place where media narratives are created on both sides of the aisle. Twelve percent of the U.S. population is on Twitter, and that includes top Republican and Democratic operatives.”

Musk has been holding town halls across Pennsylvania that, if nothing else, earn the campaign publicity on local-news outlets, which campaign officials say counts for far more than coverage on cable TV and in the national press. When Musk appeared at a town hall in the central Pennsylvania city of Lancaster last week, the headline for the story on the local CBS News affiliate read, “’Harris Is a Puppet’: Elon Musk Returns to Pa. for Town Hall, Promotes Early Voting.” A few days earlier, a local TV affiliate in Harrisburg quoted Musk telling town-hall attendees that “safe cities, secure borders, sensible spending” were his reasons for supporting Trump. “To protect the Constitution, especially the right to free speech. These are all things that seem very obvious and frankly normal and they’re in severe danger if the ‘Kamala machine’ wins,” Musk continued, according to the story on ABC27News in Harrisburg.

One Trump campaign official described Musk as being like Mike Lindell, the MyPillow magnate who was a relentless promotor of Trump in 2020 — except that Musk is someone “with real money.”

“We just stand back and marvel. He is moving the needle for us with the young and unmotivated male vote that we need in a state like Pennsylvania.” said this official. “Politics is a game of inches. Elon brings a foot.”