Trump's "election integrity" plan tests his campaign

• Trump's "election integrity" team also has raised concerns among Democrats about potential voter intimidation at the polls.
• If Trump loses on Nov. 5, the election teams would be his evidence collectors for what almost certainly would be a barrage of legal challenges — and calls for state officials not to certify the election results.

Zoom in: Early on, Trump told his team to pour its resources into "election integrity" efforts, saying that he'd take care of generating excitement and turning out voters for his campaign against President Biden.

• But now that Biden has stepped aside, Trump faces an invigorated Democratic ticket led by Vice President Kamala Harris, who's benefitting from the robust ground operation the Biden-Harris campaign built in swing states.

What we're watching: The difference between the Harris and Trump door-to-door campaigns is evident in several states, especially the seven swing states likely to decide the election — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

• Harris' team says 330,000 people have worked as volunteers since she announced her campaign last month. The campaign has about 1,500 staffers.

After months of declining to specify the scope of Trump's ground operations, Trump campaign political director James Blair posted on X that the campaign has hundreds of paid staffers.

• Blair told Axios the campaign has 14,000 trained volunteers or "Trump Force 47 Captains" in battleground states. He added that the operation has more volunteers but would not elaborate.
• Blair also disputed the size of Harris' volunteer force, calling it "fake numbers on a spreadsheet."

Trump's campaign is relying heavily on outside groups to fill the gaps in its field work.

• Among those conservative groups: The Elon Musk-funded America PAC, Turning Point USA, the Sentinel Action Fund, conservative activist Scott Presler's group Early Vote Action, and the Faith and Freedom Coalition's network of churches.
• Musk's America PAC fired most of its vendors after changing its leadership less than three months after it launched — only to rehire one of them back, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The big picture: Trump's campaign and the Republican National Committee, which he controls, say their "election integrity" network now includes about 157,000 volunteer poll watchers and poll workers.

• The campaign has recruited and trained its own poll watchers and sent Trump supporters who want to be poll workers to their county or state secretary of state offices that run paid poll worker programs, an RNC official told Axios.
• At Trump rallies in swing states, large signs with QR codes asking attendees to sign up to "Protect the Vote" are everywhere.
• RNC chair Michael Whatley told Axios the goal is to have 5,000 "election integrity volunteers" in each battleground state.

What they're saying: Former Obama campaign manager Jim Messina — whose 2012 field operation is the subject of a book that was required reading for RNC staffers during the 2020 cycle — says that having third parties do a campaign's field work "is just not as effective on both sides."

• "It really needs to be someone from the campaign because [voters] are going to have questions that you're not going be able to answer from a third party. You're also going to spend the first 10 minutes explaining who you are," he said.
• Messina added that Trump's poll-watcher plan "is just about trying to scare Democratic voters."

Whatley told Axios the RNC's get-out-the-vote operation is partly aimed at attracting people who haven't voted in the last several elections.

• "We got to figure out a way to dynamite them off the couch and get them ... out to vote," he said.