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GOP's Sean Spicer shrugs off Trump's invisible ground game: 'Offices don't vote -- people do'

Sean Spicer (CNN)
Travis Gettys
September 07, 2016

Donald Trump still has bare-bones operations in many key states just two months ahead of November's election, but the Republican Party's chief strategist insists the candidate's ground game is "phenomenal."

Sean Spicer, who also serves as the GOP's communication director, appeared Wednesday morning on CNN's "New Day," where he offered some lame spin to deflect from Trump's nearly invisible campaign operations.

"It's the most comprehensive ground game that any political operation's ever put out," Spicer said. "We do have more staff than we've ever had before, we're covering more states, we've made more voter contacts. So, I mean, from an output standpoint, at the end of the day, what matters is the number of voter contacts you're making, the amount of data you're collecting, and figuring out who those targets are that you're either going to get out early or persuade to vote for you on Election Day or before. Right now we're ahead of the curve on that, we feel very good going into the final stretch."

Co-host Alisyn Camerota pointed out that Trump has just 16 campaign offices in Ohio, compared to Hillary Clinton's 36.

He so far has only three total for Florida and Pennsylvania and none in North Carolina, while Clinton has 100 offices total in those three states, and Camerota asked Spicer to explain how Trump's campaign operation could be considered comprehensive.

"First of all, and I don't mean to be facetious when I say this, but offices don't vote -- people do," Spicer said. "What we learned from Obama in '12, Obama looked really comprehensively at the Bush-Cheney '04 model (and) figured out what they did well and improved upon that. What we did at the party is looked at what they did and improved upon that, and that's what we focused on, which is voter contact, getting people trained, out into the field, making contact with voters, persuading them, registering, understanding more about them."

Spicer then spun a web of buzzwords and catchphrases whose verbs clashed where they existed at all.

"We've had over 5,000 volunteers comprehensively -- I mean, these are fellows that are having weekly metric trained, we've had over 1,000 paid staff on the ground," Spicer said. "Each one of those people is going out and making sure that we understand every single voter that we need, where those turfs are where people live, what's making them vote, what issues are important, who the key influences are, are they voting early (or) absentee."

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