NPR: How Trump Waged an Under the Radar Ground Game
In a nutshell, Trump did have ground game:
PARSCALE: Yeah.You know, all modeling and almost all polling's based off of a previous expectation of voter turnout, that somehow it's going to look like before. We'll pool asked questions, then we're going to know what's going to happen in the future. The problem is, if the same people don't show up, then all that means nothing. So we created models that look in all different directions.
And by the week of, I knew that the Rust Belt was going to be the more easy one to win, so I was moving targeted money around.
And this is the advantage of - I didn't have to go get 12 steps of approval. I had to get one from Mr. Trump. And we can move whole budget around from mail, phones, TV, digital - everything - within a couple of hours. And so I think that ended up paying in the end. I mean, I think you see that - how we won Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and Michigan. If I would have waited one more day, maybe that had the effect of the, you know, 100,000 votes.
snip.....
PARSCALE: Well mainly, at the end, it was all GOTV.
MARTIN: All get out the vote.
PARSCALE: And partnership with the RNC, yeah. So...
MARTIN: It's interesting because the campaign was lambasted for not having field offices, which is kind of the traditional structure of a get-out-the-vote campaign.
PARSCALE: Yeah, I've always thought that's ridiculous. Most people don't understand what the RNC ground game is. The same people, the same volunteers, the same leadership going into the '14 midterms were in place for '16. So when you turn them back on, they don't have to rebuild all those relationships. They don't have to redo everything. On top of that, they automated the door-knocking program, which was a huge step forward, where the Democrats are still scanning pieces of paper trying to get a database.
MARTIN: What does that mean when you say automate the door-knocking program?
PARSCALE: So if you had an app on your iPhone or Android, you could go knock doors. And when you knock that door, you push a button on your iPhone - you talked and communicated with this person. It would immediately send back to our database, so now we know we don't have to communicate with that person in another method, where Democrats still use pieces of paper that have to be scanned in and then databased later. So they weren't getting real-time information on their door-knocking program. That's a huge advantage for us into our ground game.
http://www.npr.org/2016/12/06/504520364/how-trump-waged-an-under-the-radar-ground-game
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I thought this article was interesting. I also heard that some of the computers in Hillary's campaign were attacked by the same bug that attacked DU which caused problems with the database. Hence there was redundancy with calling. I know I went over my 4 paragraph limit, but I found the info useful.
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To me this sounded like a CYA explaining how they brilliantly won those swing states and lost the popular vote by millions. Well, now we know: they relied on the tried and true and cheated six ways to sunday, thus their raft of lawsuits trying to shut down the recounts.
Also, I noticed this guy taking credit for Trump's tweets, the start of another CYA -- it wasn't Trump sending those asinine tweets, it was his brilliant team!
Right. 
