In the final weeks before the November election, Houston-area supporters of Donald Trump say they feel let down and abandoned by both the Republican Party and the nominee's campaign.

Still, they persevere to get out the vote for their candidate, standing on street corners, knocking on doors without the traditional list of homes to target and handing out home-printed fliers.

"We have gotten no guidance," said Jeana Blackford, a local leader of pro-Trump activists. "I've been doing this for 30 years, and we've never seen this. It's absurd."

The Republican parties of Texas and Harris County said they were running get-out-the-vote efforts and that they support all candidates on the ballot equally, but frustrated local Trump supporters allege the party is turning its back on its presidential nominee and his millions of followers.

The sentiment mirrors events unfolding nationally, in which a schism between the Trump campaign and the GOP is widening as the nominee berates top party members and Republican officials rescind their support of his candidacy.

"We get calls all the time from people saying, 'the party does not support him (Trump),' " said Ben McPhaul, executive director of the Harris County Republican Party. "Maybe they get that perception from the national party, though I'm not sure that's true. But we're always quick to say we support every candidate on the ticket and we support them all equally."

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He said the party has been block walking and making phone calls on behalf of Republican candidates on a daily basis. The Texas GOP also said it was "committed to electing Republicans up and down the ballot."

Diverging interests

In about the last month, the interests of the Trump campaign and the Republican party have sharply diverged, said Matt Mackowiak, a Republican strategist based in Austin and Washington, D.C. As Trump plummets in most major polls, he said, the GOP must "be realistic about what's achievable at this point" and focus on getting Republicans elected to offices at all levels.

"The RNC has no responsibility to help a suicide bomber detonate in a crowd of Republicans," Mackowiak said, suggesting Trump's low appeal could harm other races.

Blackford, however, said that with "so much at stake in this election," every level of the party should go all-in for Trump.

In a typical election, state and local parties generally focus on state and local candidates and do not carry a lot of weight supporting the presidential nominee, said University of Houston political scientist Brandon Rottinghaus.

Promotion of the presidential candidate isusually is left largely to the national party and the candidate's campaign.

The Trump campaign, however, has been mostly absent in Texas. Its Houston office opened for a few months in the run-up to the March primary, then closed in the summer, Blackford said. She said local Trump supporters did not trust the Trump campaign staff, but she stressed that Trump himself had not known about the "chaos and disorganization" in his staff until it was too late.

Blackford, a 43-year-old stay-at-home mom and veteran campaign worker who traveled to other states for Trump in the primaries, said she has about 350 people in the Houston area eager to get to work, but they have been given no direction.

By comparison, the Hillary Clinton campaign has six Texas offices. Stephen Abrams Harrison, a volunteer in the Houston headquarters, said the campaign supplies the office with computers, as well as buttons and yard signs. Volunteers sit in on weekly conference calls with the board of state directors.

'Working up a game plan'

Fed up Trump supporters in September formed a political action committee based in Waxahachie, called Make America Safe Again, a merger of existing grass-roots organizations. Board member Stephani Scruggs said the PAC was formed to make up for what they perceived as the Republican National Committee's abandonment of Trump's candidacy.

The group posted a news release Thursday titled, "Pro-Trump super PAC implements own ground game amid rumors of RNC betrayal."

Scruggs said the PAC has a national network, and its primary program has been providing volunteers with a smart phone app called FriendsVote, which sends messages to personal contacts through email and social networks.

Blackford said that, absent the GOP and the Trump campaign, the PAC has become the biggest source of support for her local grass-roots efforts.

"We are working up a game plan," Blackford said. "This is just the beginning."

Outside of the local GOP, the Houston area's community of Trump fans largely is centered around a Facebook page, which Blackford helps administer, with almost 1,200 members.

It was started by Cooper Jackson, a 30-year-old from Waller who works in a northwest Houston manufacturing plant. Jackson enthusiastically supported Ron Paul in the former U.S. representative's 2012 bid for the GOP nomination, and he said Trump's noninterventionalist foreign policy initially drew him in during the primaries.

Wearing the Trump campaign's signature red "Make America great again" cap in a Mexican restaurant on Friday, Jackson pointed out a 70-word Facebook post he made Wednesday on a separate page, which garnered 294 likes.

"Trump is the karma the Republican party deserves," it said. "Trump isn't really a Republican, he isn't really a Democrat either."

Left in 'battle trenches'

Jackson described Trump as an "antibiotic" for the GOP, with the "germs" being the "neoconservatives" and the "social conservatives." He characterized the election as a battle to see who would be expelled from the party, the germs or the medicine. And he said he felt like the Harris County GOP, the state party and the national party were not on his side.

"They're leaving the Trump people out in the battle trenches while they recede to their fort to save their down-ticket freaking election," he said. "Meanwhile, the media has us pinned down with machine guns."

The schism, which spans from the local to national political scene, could have an effect on Republican turnout. Some voters may be so turned off that they stay home on Election Day.

That, combined with the GOP nominee's low appeal to social conservatives, could make the presidential race in Texas far closer than veteran politicos would expect from the typically deep red state, said Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.

"We don't know how big that effect is going to be," Henson said. "I think we're kind of marching into unknown territory."

A poll released Thursday gave Trump a four-point lead over Clinton, but that was within the margin of error.

That is well below the lead 15-point lead with which Mitt Romney won the state in 2012.

"If you want to know the truth," Blackford said. "I blame the state (GOP), and the national and the local offices. I really do. That's who I blame."