GREENTREE, Pa. — Before the sun came up in this Pittsburgh suburb, 12 Texans and a young man from Norway were already on their second cup of coffee and set to get on with the business of helping Republican Donald J. Trump win in the stubbornly blue state of Pennsylvania.

“We are here to make sure that not one voter in Western Pennsylvania isn’t contacted face-to-face to remind them to vote for Trump,” said George Woodruff of Gunter, Texas, a retired Marine and airline pilot.

Meet the members of the Mighty Texas Strike Force, a group of nearly 2,000 mostly Texans who have deployed across several battleground states to push voters to pick the Republican in this year’s presidential election.

“We were founded during then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush’s first campaign for the presidency,” explained Rick Potter, the head of the organization. “We are a group of devoted Texas volunteers who have deployed to several national battleground swing states ever since his first election.”

Potter said it began when Republicans wanted to get involved but knew their efforts weren’t needed in reliably red Texas, “So we have been working in states where they need help moving numbers ever since.

“And we’ve never stopped.”

Potter said they started in the beginning of October, volunteering on the most local level to help provide face-to-face voter contact in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Florida, Wisconsin and Iowa.

There are 50 of them temporarily residing in the western half of the Keystone State, deploying every day, knocking on voters’ doors.

“We start knocking on doors around 9 a.m. and go until 8 p.m., only stopping long enough to grab some lunch and get more coffee,” Potter said.

There are also nearly 100 strike force members deployed in Philadelphia as well. Both efforts are above and beyond the work of the local and national party mechanisms in place.

They all have an app on their phone that tells them everything they need to know about a particular voter before they even knock on their door. “We know who’ve they’ve likely voted for before, their likes and dislikes, and if they could be persuaded to vote Republican,” said Mary Lou Durham of Houston.

As they walk away, they enter what they have learned from the voter into the app, and that data is used by the coordinated campaign for Election Day, said Durham, whose husband runs a Houston-based steel pipe manufacturer and whose grandson will be joining her Friday in Pittsburgh.

Across the state in Philadelphia, Solomon Anderson — a black 45-year-old businessman who has liked Trump’s “attitude and business mind” for over 30 years — has been spending most of the closing weeks of the election working with the Texas strike force.

“I was looking for an opportunity to do something for Trump anyway, when I heard about these people who had traveled all of this way, giving up their salaries or vacations and on their own dime, I figured the least I could do was be part of their effort,” he said.

Solomon says sometimes people give him a hard time because he is black and supports Trump. “That’s OK, I don’t care. I have never been part of the ‘we,’ that collective mind thinking isn’t how I operate, I have always been able to be an independent critical thinker about issues,” he said.

Solomon voted for Barack Obama in 2008, “But before his first term ended, it was clear to me he was going in a progressive direction I did not support.

‘The research shows that door-to-door canvassing can actually alter election results.’ - Paul Sracic, Youngstown State University

“My experiences have been interesting going door to door,” he says. “The normal tagline Trump gets is that he is racist, and when people say that to me, I always respond with, ‘So you think I am stupid enough to be racist?’

“That usually makes people stop in their tracks right there and start to listen to what I have to say.

“Do I persuade them all? No. But we are making a difference, and I will tell you this, Hillary Clinton will not enjoy the large black vote that Obama did here in 2012,” he said.

Face-to-face persuasion has been shown to work on people on the fence, said Paul Sracic, political science professor at Youngstown State University. “The research shows that door-to-door canvassing can actually alter election results,” he said.

Since 1992, Pennsylvania has been for the GOP what Lucy and her football have been to Charlie Brown in the “Peanuts” comic strip; every cycle, Republican hopefuls think, this is the year, this is that time Republicans can win the state. And every cycle, the Democrats win, largely on the backs of the voters whom the strike force is targeting in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

Potter said they have specifically targeted these two areas to keep the numbers down for the Democrats. “We may not win Allegheny County and Philadelphia, but we certainly will help drive up our margins,” Potter said.

“Hell, I’m not here to close the margins,” said Woodruff, a career military man who served in the Marines, “I am here to win.”