Standing next to her hastily packed suitcase in Michigan’s Macomb County on Wednesday night, Tyra Muldrow had a bad feeling in her gut.
“I have this eerie feeling that I need to get the hell up out of there,” says Muldrow, a 20-year-old Black woman from Florida. She was in Michigan as a door knocker, hired by a subcontractor for Elon Musk’s America PAC operation to turn out the vote for Donald Trump in the heavily contested working-class suburbs of Detroit.
Muldrow and the rest of her canvassing group of roughly a dozen people had just been fired en masse, after WIRED reported that they had been tricked and threatened as part of Musk’s get-out-the-vote effort. Speaking publicly for the first time about her ordeal, Muldrow says that the canvassers in her group were fired with little explanation beyond a complaint that someone had spoken with the press. Many, including her, were still owed money. Muldrow had to find her own way home; others are still stranded in Michigan.
A representative for Musk and America PAC did not return a request for comment.
On October 15, Muldrow’s cousin Ebony Jones recruited her for the job, offering upwards of $2,000 per week and a return flight, per emails reviewed by WIRED. Muldrow signed a nondisclosure agreement the same day, and was then flown to Michigan on October 18 as part of a campaign for Blitz Canvassing, a subcontractor which had received more than $9 million from America PAC for presidential campaign canvassing as of October 29. Only upon her arrival in Michigan did Muldrow realize what this job would really entail: canvassing for Trump.
No one in her group of contractors—referred to internally as a “cell”—had a driver’s license. They were initially transported via Ubers, and were then driven back and forth for nearly two weeks in a pair of seatless U-Haul vans between their targeted neighborhoods, staying in a series of motels and Airbnbs in the Detroit suburbs of Warren, Livonia, and Mount Clemens. The three suburbs are in Wayne and Macomb County, the latter of which was the only Detroit-area county Trump won in 2020. In Macomb, where Muldrow primarily spent her time canvassing, he got 53 percent of the vote—almost exactly the same level of support he earned in 2016, when he secured a margin of tens of thousands of votes in a state decided by a little more than 10,000 votes.
The cell was composed entirely of Black people, strangers from out of state who did not know each other but were usually forced to share rooms, according to Muldrow. According to a text message from Jones, Muldrow was promised $1.50 per door, and $2 per door if she knocked 1,000 or more doors per week—an all but impossible number. Muldrow further says they were told they would have to pay for their lodging unless they met the unrealistic quotas. The contract the door knockers signed stated they were “expected to maintain a 17 to 22 percent engagement rate during the campaign,” a high target relative to the number of people who typically open their door for a stranger. Videos recorded by Muldrow show cramped living quarters and frequent bickering between members of the cell.
“Our subcontractors never should have driven their canvassers in a U-Haul van, and those involved were immediately reprimanded,” Tim Pollard of Blitz Canvassing tells WIRED.
On Wednesday, October 30, Muldrow and her fellow door knockers were fired hours after the publication of the WIRED story.
At first, some people had trouble logging in to Campaign Sidekick, the glitchy app used by America PAC for canvassing. There was confusion before they were finally told it was over: “Everyone is fired,” said Jones, who served as the door knockers’ manager, in a GroupMe chat, according to screenshots obtained by WIRED.
Jones did not reply to a request for comment.
Muldrow thought Jones might be joking about everyone getting fired, but some of the door knockers noticed they had been locked out of Campaign Sidekick, according to the group chat.
“I called my mom immediately,” Muldrow says. “My mom told me I was overreacting because, it's [my] cousin, so she was like, ‘Oh, maybe she's playing a joke on you guys. Don't take it literal.’ And my mom was like, ‘She sent you up there in the first place. You went with her. If anything, you would have your flight home through her. She's not going to let you be stranded.’”
Then, Muldrow says, Jones began asking the door knockers which one of them spoke to the press.
As arguments ensued, Muldrow started to fear for her safety. Muldrow packed up her belongings and called Connor Berdy, a 29-year-old political consultant based in Warren, Michigan, and the founder of Vote For Change LLC, a consulting group in Southeast Michigan for his community organizing work.
Muldrow had met Berdy—who runs canvassing operations for school board, county commission, and judicial candidates—when, by chance, one of his employees struck up a chat with her while she was canvassing near their home on October 23. Berdy and Muldrow got lunch soon after, and Muldrow told him about how the door knockers in her group had been tricked, threatened, and driven around in U-Hauls to their door-knocking locations.
Management had “clearly not prioritized the safety of the workers or the integrity of the operation,” says Berdy.
Berdy then arrived, and pretended to be an Uber driver to get Muldrow out of the situation. He had already bought Muldrow a flight back home to Florida, paying out of his own pocket.
“First I see Tyra on the side of the road with her suitcase and everything,” Berdy tells WIRED. “So I pull up, turn my hazards on, act like an Uber, and then right as she starts walking around, I hear someone say, ‘Where's Tyra?’ And, ‘Oh, that sneaky little bitch.’”
Muldrow made it to the airport and on to her flight home. At that point, she says, she had only been paid $69 for the canvassing job, for which she had been promised she could earn upwards of $2,000 a week. A Cash App payment for that dollar amount, which she showed WIRED, was listed as “for Gotv”—the acronym for get out the vote. Muldrow says she texted Jones asking when she would get the rest of the money she was owed. All she got was a read receipt.
As of Saturday evening, at least three others from the canvassing group hadn’t received full payment for the work they’d done before being fired, according to screenshots from the GroupMe chat.
“Following the incident, some of the canvassers and contractors involved left the program, some decided to stay, all have been paid,” Pollard says. WIRED could not confirm that canvassers in Muldrow’s group had decided to stay, nor that they have all been paid.
The Trump campaign has largely outsourced its field operation in Michigan, a crucial swing state, to Musk—a move that has come under heavy criticism. Outside of Michigan, America PAC is a codefendant in a class action in California over unpaid wages to canvassers and other alleged labor violations, a development first reported by WIRED. Blitz Canvassing has also reportedly had issues with the Campaign Sidekick app flagging door knocks as fake. In Nevada and Arizona, up to a quarter of the door interactions were flagged as potential fakes within the app, according to The Guardian. (“Sidekick was never expected to handle the auditing of America PAC’s door operation. The reason the PAC is confident in its numbers is because of the auditing procedures each canvassing firm puts in place and the auditing procedures of the PAC writ large,” a person familiar with the America PAC operation told The Guardian at the time.)
After she returned home, Muldrow didn’t think she was going to get paid what was owed to her any time soon.
However, on Saturday night, right after WIRED reached out to Jones for comment, Muldrow heard from her cousin for the first time since she’d been fired. “You did not get 1000 doors but to make this right and move forward we will pay you the $2000,” she wrote, according to text messages reviewed by WIRED. “The quickest solution I can think of is to send someone to pay you in cash.”
Later that night, shortly after WIRED reached out to America PAC for comment, Muldrow was pleasantly surprised. She’d just been paid $2,000 on Cash App. The caption?
“For Michigan Gotv 742 doors paid in full.”
A few minutes later, Muldrow got a follow-up text from Jones. “Please let wired know that you’ve been paid asap.”
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