NJ Governor Race Tests Effectiveness Of GOP Ground Game

President Donald Trump won in 2024 in part due to a massive, well-funded, and well-organized ground game operation. This year’s gubernatorial elections — such as the one in New Jersey — are the first real test of whether that ground game was built to extend past the 2024 election.

In 2020, Trump received a low percentage of the mail-in votes in Pennsylvania, and the midterms in 2022, with strong Democrat mail-in participation, didn’t go great for Republicans there either. By 2024, the Republican Party knew it had to work with mail-in ballots.

Citizens Alliance CEO Cliff Maloney told The Federalist that Charlie Kirk called him and said Republicans needed an organization in 2024 in Pennsylvania specifically focused on competing with Democrats on mail-in ballots.

“And so, in 2024 we ended up knocking 510,000 doors [in Pennsylvania],” Maloney said. “Trump had 20 percent of the mail-in versus Biden, and we took him to 34.5 percent versus Harris, when you compare the actual mail-in votes, Trump versus Harris and Trump versus Biden. So, it was a roughly a 14.5 percent increase, just the mail-ins.”

While there were other door knockers, Citizens Alliance’s PA Chase program became well known to Pennsylvania Republicans in the 2024 ground game.

Maloney says New Jersey’s Republican candidate for governor, Jack Ciattarelli, asked Citizens Alliance to turn the PA Chase into a New Jersey program, and on Aug. 4, they launched the New Jersey Chase.

The program has 105 full-time paid, trained ballot-chasers knocking on targeted doors. First, they visit Republicans who only voted once in the last four elections and encourage them to request a mail-in ballot and participate in this election.

“If they get a mail-in ballot, they become much more likely to vote,” Maloney said. “Then once ballots are out, which is now, we change our whole universe. We’re going to every single Republican that has a ballot. We’re reminding them, you need to send your ballot back today.”

The same door-knocker returns to remind the voter every seven to 10 days until that mail-in ballot is sent. Once the resident votes, the door-knocking stops at that address.

“We really took this playbook from Biden in 2020 in Pennsylvania. They called it ‘annoying the voter.’ We got a hold of their training slides. … We call it a ‘reminder campaign.’ I don’t call it ‘annoying the voter,’” Maloney said with a laugh.

Maloney says this is easy door-knocking because the people they are targeting are “hard core Republicans” already aligned with them on the issues; they just need to be convinced to go cast their vote. Door knockers are finding people want to talk about Ciattarelli, the candidate, and there have been many conversations about Charlie Kirk.

NJ Chase door-knockers start after a daily 9:30 a.m. meeting and finish at 7 p.m., knocking six days a week, off on Sundays. Already they have knocked on more than 330,000 doors and aim to get to 500,000 by election day.

And for the first time, through county party leadership, the New Jersey GOP is offering 50 cents a door — paying $100 for every 200 doors knocked — according to Sussex County Republican Chairman Joseph LaBarbera. In rural Sussex County, the goal is to hit 20,000 doors before election day, he said.

“Typically, we don’t have a strong Republican ground game in New Jersey. Typically, Republicans don’t want a door-knock. They don’t want [to] canvas; that’s just the way the Republicans are in New Jersey,” LaBarbera told The Federalist. “In 2021 there really was no ground game, especially in my county. There was not one recorded door knock in my entire county for Jack Ciattarelli, even though we still got him a 65 percent of Republican turnout. Typically we, the Republicans in New Jersey, put out a lot of signs, do a lot of calls, but we don’t door-knock.”

LaBarbera believes the New Jersey Republican Party was “crushed” under former Republican Gov. Chris Christie.

“I mean Chris Christie allowed a lot of Democrats to have appointments in the state. Chris Christie worked across the aisle very dynamically, and it didn’t seem like we had a big bench built under the Christie administration,” LaBarbera said. “So when Christie left office and [Gov. Phil] Murphy took over, there was a very weak Republican bench — this is my personal point of view — and then that weak bench became very demoralized under the overload and the power of the Democrats in the legislature. So the Republican Party was very demoralized for many, many years.”

But he feels optimistic about Ciattarelli, even though New Jersey is a majority Democrat state.

Ciattarelli, a former New Jersey assemblyman, faces Democrat candidate U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill. LaBarbera says Sherrill’s support is overwhelmingly from the Democratic National Committee and that a number of Democrat mayors have endorsed Ciattarelli.

As of Oct. 1, New Jersey had 2,525,346 registered Democrat voters and 1,670,297 registered Republicans — a difference of 855,049 voters, New Jersey’s statewide voter registration summary shows. And there are 2,340,583 unaffiliated voters, plus more than 70,000 voters registered to other parties. Both parties recognize the need to convince these swing voters to pick their candidate, but Republicans also need a higher percentage — ideally all — of their known registered party members to cast their votes. This is why the ground game is so important. A registered Republican who votes is most likely to choose the Republican candidate.

Data cruncher Michael Pruser of Decision Desk HQ has been monitoring the daily mail ballot returns on his X account, using the New Jersey Vote by Mail file.

As of Friday, nearly 42 percent of the mail ballots requested by Republicans have been returned, and nearly 41 percent of Democrat ballots have been returned, according to Pruser. Democrats have requested 527,145 mail ballots and returned 214,248. Republicans have requested fewer total ballots than Democrats have returned. So far Republicans have requested 180,855 ballots and returned 75,732. Voters have until Oct. 28 to request a mail-in ballot.

Swing voters requested 213,000 ballots but have returned only 50,522, meaning they have a much lower rate of return (24 percent) so far.

“If we can make [Ciattarelli] competitive with the mail-in and he has the same turnout from 2021 on Election Day, he’s the governor, right?” Maloney said. “There are different variables here, but yes, we still need major turnout on Election Day from what I would call, Republican Election Day voters.”

Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.