YOUNGSTOWN — With the COVID-19 pandemic stopping face-to-face contact with voters, the campaign to re-elect President Donald Trump has made the transition to a virtual outreach effort.

Trump’s campaign “went completely virtual” March 13 and has operated with great efficiency since then, said Christina Purves, deputy director of regional communications for the Republican National Committee.

“It’s all calls right now as we can’t go door-to-door,” she said. “We have the program we were using out in the field. It was a matter of getting it online.”

Dan Lusheck, Ohio press secretary for Trump Victory — a joint effort between the RNC and the Trump campaign — said volunteers and staff for the president made 1.5 million total voter contacts nationally on March 21, including more than 100,000 in Ohio. Those were all done by phone by those in their homes using an app known as Trump Talk.

“We were able to do this successfully because our base has been working hard in Ohio, in the Mahoning Valley and Youngstown, since 2016 to be successful in this transition,” he said.

The Trump campaign never left Ohio after the Republican’s victory in 2016 — allowing its operation to grow in the state, Lusheck said.

The first thing asked on calls to voters is about their health and about Trump’s response to the pandemic.

The Trump Victory Leadership Initiative (TVLI) traditionally was done in-person in groups. TVLI is a training program that allows the campaign’s top volunteers to develop the skills needed to become field organizers and in many cases they become paid field staff. TVLI has trained about 30,000 people since it started in 2015 as the Republican Leadership Initiative.

“We’ve now moved all of these trainings into platforms like Zoom and Google Hangouts,” Lusheck said. “We’re retraining all of our volunteers in all of these. We’re teaching them digital organizing and ways to contact voters that isn’t face to face. It helps us share the president’s response to COVID-19. It also allows us to retrain our volunteers.”

‘AS LONG AS IT TAKES’

The campaign is prepared to work virtually “as long as it takes, and we’re ready to transition back to traditional campaigning” when the time is right, he said.

Lusheck said: “Obviously there’s a lot of power in having that face to face with people — and we have had a lot of success with MAGA (Make America Great Again) meet-ups and his rallies. In lieu of that, the calls are an effective and efficient way to contact people.”

There will be time to meet in person with voters as the November general election approaches, he said.

About 2 million voter contacts in Ohio have been made during this campaign, Lusheck said, including hundreds of thousands in the last week-plus.

“We’re in a really good position right now,” he said. “We’ve done incredible things transitioning to a virtual campaign. It’s a difficult time for people, but we’re doing everything we can to get the president’s message out.”

PANDEMIC RESPONSE

Trump’s reaction to the pandemic has been met with mixed reactions.

On Jan. 31, the Trump administration declared the novel coronavirus a public health emergency.

But on Jan. 22, the president said the country had the virus “under control. It’s going to be fine.”

On Feb. 2, he said, “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.”

On Feb. 24, he tweeted: “The coronavirus is very much under control in the USA.”

Trump also said March 24 that he wanted the country “opened up and just raring to go by Easter,” which was less than three weeks away when he said it.

He abandoned that goal this past Sunday, saying he would keep guidelines on social distancing in place through the end of April and “we can expect that by June 1, we will be well on our way to recovery, we think by June 1.”

U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Howland, on Wednesday called it “insane” that President Donald Trump has “not taken over the manufacturing, production and supply chain” of personal protective equipment desperately needed by health care workers to keep themselves safe.

“We’re not talking about producing airplanes. We’re talking about masks and gloves and gowns and face protectors and these N-95 respirator masks. That’s not complicated,” Ryan said.

Ryan, a Democrat who was a presidential candidate last fall, said Trump has not made good use of the Defense Production Act that was enacted a couple of weeks ago.

“We’re the United States of America. We should be able to put this stuff together in a matter of weeks, and we should have been doing it a long time ago. We haven’t.

“The reality is we’re two weeks away in Ohio for needing these ventilators, and if we would have started this four weeks ago, we could be in production now.”

On Wednesday, the campaign of Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential frontrunner, said Trump continues “to mislead Americans about (his) failure to adequately develop and deploy an effective coronavirus test — a failure that allowed the virus to spread unchecked and explode across our country.”

Lusheck said: “President Trump took decisive and aggressive action as early as January to get ahead of this crisis. While Democrats played partisan games, President Trump prioritized the health and safety of the American people every step of the way.”

dskolnick@tribtoday.com