One morning in mid-April, Elon Musk sat in a suite at the Proper Hotel in downtown Austin and texted former President Donald J. Trump.
Mr. Trump had spent the last several years deriding early and absentee voting. But now Mr. Musk was sitting with the political team that was advising him on his nascent pro-Trump super PAC. The team told him that Republicans could win Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania only if they delivered on those kinds of votes.
Mr. Musk was aghast — and so he reached out to Mr. Trump, then the presumptive Republican nominee. You’ve got to stop telling people not to vote early, Mr. Musk texted, according to two people to whom Mr. Musk told this story. He was unsure his message was received. But later that evening, Mr. Trump posted on Truth Social.
“ABSENTEE VOTING, EARLY VOTING, AND ELECTION DAY VOTING ARE ALL GOOD OPTIONS,” Mr. Trump wrote.
Mr. Musk’s advisers were blown away. Mr. Trump, who barely knew Mr. Musk, seemed to value his opinion.
Since then, the men have forged a tight alliance. Mr. Musk, the richest man in the world, has turned his account on X, his social media platform, into a pro-Trump megaphone and joined the former president for raucous rallies. Perhaps most important, though, is the $130-million-and-counting effort led by his super PAC, America PAC, to deliver early voters in battleground states, an operation that rejects much of the conventional wisdom about how to win the White House.
It is unusual for a candidate from a major political party to lean so heavily on a field operation that is funded and controlled by an outside organization. If Mr. Musk is seen as successful, he could usher in a new era when billionaires, who have no legal limit on their spending, dominate ground operations.
Neither Mr. Musk nor a representative for the Trump campaign responded to requests for comment.
“If someone can figure out how to out efficiently outsource the most labor-intensive parts so that they can be financed by a single donor with unlimited resources, that could transform the structure of political campaigns,” said Sasha Issenberg, the author of “The Victory Lab,” a book on how campaigns use data analytics.
The Musk Model
Democrats and Republicans have different approaches to campaign field operations, which seek to identify likely supporters and then nudge them with door knocks, pamphlets and text messages until they go to the polls. Democrats, including Vice President Kamala Harris, tend to rely mainly on paid staff members who organize squads of volunteers, with additional support from labor unions.
This election, the Trump campaign has seized on new guidance from the Federal Election Commission that allows it to coordinate canvassing operations with super PACs.
It found one in America PAC, which Mr. Musk started earlier this year as he grew fixated on the mechanics of turning out 800,000 to 1 million new Trump voters.
There was a slow start. Mr. Musk fired his initial team after months of work and burning through $20 million, and later replaced his staff in Nevada and Arizona. But now the PAC, primarily though four different companies, is paying for what donors have been told is an operation of more than 2,500 canvassers, largely targeting rural voters in battleground states. Many wear a uniform of white polo shirts embroidered with an American flag as they try to hit about 150 doors a day.
Armies of paid door knockers have been deployed before, but seldom on such a short timeline with such a large budget. Mr. Musk himself has poured nearly $120 million into America PAC and recruited other donors.
Its deep pockets allow the super PAC to target people likely to support Mr. Trump but whose voting records are so spotty that more traditional field operations would have skipped them. The campaign believes that’s a better use of resources than trying to persuade a dwindling pool of undecided voters, according to a person who helps oversee America PAC’s canvassing.
America PAC has declined to reveal the scale of its field operations, in part out of a desire to not tip its hand to Democrats. But people with knowledge of the operations said that in most swing states, the super PAC is trying to do three to four “passes” of targeted voters. In many states, workers have knocked on more than 1 million doors, including in Arizona, Georgia and Michigan, where America PAC has its biggest footprint with 600 canvassers.
The super PAC has recently increased resources in North Carolina and Wisconsin, said two people with knowledge of the operations, with about 750,000 knocks so far in Wisconsin. Knocks are just under 1 million in Nevada.
All told, America PAC has completed about 10 million door knocks, according to a person familiar with the figures. Of course, not everyone is open to talking about Mr. Trump. In some states, only about 15 percent of the door knocks result in full conversations.
Arizona has been a particular sore point for the super PAC. It had to effectively start over twice after laying off two successive rounds of vendors over what it called performance issues. But now, there are about 475 active canvassers in the state.
Pennsylvania has had some vendor turnover, too, but the state has become a personal focus for Mr. Musk, who has not only flooded it with door knockers but also appeared at rallies for Mr. Trump in Harrisburg, Lancaster, the Philadelphia suburbs and Butler, the site of a July attempt to assassinate Mr. Trump.
A Risk of Fraud
Relying on paid canvassers presents a risk. Canvassers often jump around firms, states and even parties in search of the biggest payday. Some earn between $20 and $30 an hour; others are paid per door, typically $2, although some canvassers told The New York Times that the rate had doubled in recent days.
That churn fuels concerns that some may be cutting corners, calling into question the accuracy of the data.
One canvasser in Arizona, for instance, was claiming to be hitting doors from a golf course more than 7,000 miles away, according to internal America PAC records seen by The Times.
Some people close to America PAC have voiced concerns to its leadership about the possibility of significant fraud in its operations, said a person with knowledge of the conversations. Recent internal data showed that in some states, as much as 25 percent of the doors reached on a given day could be flagged for “unusual activity” — for instance, a canvasser who was not trackable in the field or who hit a suspiciously high number of homes, said a person who has seen the numbers.
Blitz Canvassing, the main vendor of the super PAC, has warned canvassers not to engage in “GPS spoofing” — circumventing the system that tracks their whereabouts, according to internal text messages. In the four states overseen by Blitz, canvassers responsible for about 7 percent of the total doors knocked have been fired for suspected fraud, said a person with knowledge of the matter.
The super PAC uses multiple levels of auditing to check the work of vendors. But the audits can be slow, and vendors have little incentive to catch bad actors because the companies are typically paid based on the number of doors they hit.
A recent video and texts obtained by The Times showed tensions between an auditor trying to root out fraud and a canvasser in Michigan. The canvasser appeared to have logged several house visits in rapid succession at a restroom.
Defenders of America PAC argue that such incidents are not uncommon in the unruly world of paid canvassing, but the volume may seem higher because America PAC’s operations are so large.
The field operation is by far America PAC’s top priority. But the group has also sent more direct mail to Republican voters than any outside of the Trump campaign’s coordinated effort with state parties, according to Mintt, a mail-tracking firm.
America PAC has funded pro-Trump robocalls this month urging people to vote early. And it has recently launched a small amount of radio advertising. A spot that aired in North Carolina, for instance, said that Ms. Harris had not done enough to help the victims of Hurricane Helene. The group recently began offering rides to the polls for voters who live in the designated disaster area.
In private conversations, Mr. Musk has said he is happy with his super PAC’s performance, according to two people who have spoken with him.
Sign Here, Please
One of Mr. Musk’s innovations is fairly old-fashioned: a petition. The idea came out of an internal competition in which some people connected to the PAC flew into Pittsburgh to pitch a creative use of Mr. Musk’s money.
For the past few weeks, Mr. Musk has offered $47 payments to anyone who can persuade a swing-state voter to sign a petition pledging support for “free speech and the right to bear arms,” and provide a mailing address, email address and phone number. Every day, Mr. Musk awards $1 million to a random signer. He even set up a brand-new company — called United States of America Inc. — to pay the money.
But multiple people involved in the super PAC confessed they were befuddled as to why the petition was being offered.
Information on the signers is not used in the canvassing program, and the primary objective of the petition seems to be to attract media attention and boost the profile of the super PAC itself, in addition to yielding data that could be used in the future. The effort has at least one fan: In private conversations, Mr. Trump has remarked about the creativity of Mr. Musk’s petition, according to a person who has heard him, although some senior Trump officials remain nervous about the super PAC’s broader performance.
America PAC has said it is sending out 187,000 checks for petition referrals. Add the 14 million-dollar winners and that equals at least $22 million in payouts. The gambit has drawn the attention of the Justice Department, which has warned it may not be legal, and the Philadelphia district attorney, who is suing Mr. Musk, claiming the effort amounts to an illegal lottery.
Some canvassers said they had quit in order to work on the petition full time, since it was a better-paying proposition. One entrepreneur set up shop as an online middleman, promising petition signers $10 if they used his email address as their referral.
Mr. Musk has surrounded himself with a mix of personalities as he undertakes this project. People advising the super PAC include longtime friends without experience in politics, like Steve Davis, one of Mr. Musk’s top advisers, who helped develop the idea for the petition; online influencers such as Alex Lorusso; and more traditional Republican operatives, including Chris Young, a field-organizing expert who recently took over as the super PAC’s treasurer.
Ultimately, though, Mr. Musk, known for being a demanding boss, is intimately involved with strategy, people close to the group say.
In recent weeks, Mr. Musk had a new idea, one that raised eyebrows in the specialized, highly paid world of political consulting, according to people briefed on the plan: America PAC’s top vendors should go out into the field themselves to knock on doors alongside their workers.
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