In some races, Republican candidates who have worked for years to build their own independent turnout machines are reaping benefits, even as the presidential race goes sideways. But in others, party officials and campaign staffers say Trump’s poor performance is putting down-ticket candidates at risk.

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“Depressing Republican turnout will have an effect all over the country,” said Jai Chabrai, an Ohio-based strategist and former top advisor to Gov. John Kasich (R). “Candidates around the country need to figure out ways to localize their races and make it hyper-relevant to voters’ lives.”

Party strategists began testing worst-case scenarios months ago. One prominent polling firm found about a third of voters said they would skip voting in the presidential race altogether, though they would still turn out.

“Our candidates are focused on their races and the issues in their districts,” said Ronna Romney McDaniel, chair of the Michigan Republican Party. “They’ve never really been dependent on Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton’s race.”

Still, Trump’s collapse over the last two weeks, beginning with his dismal performance during the first presidential debate and continuing through the release of a taped conversation in which he made vulgar comments about women, represents the GOP’s worst fears realized: That their nominee would become an albatross around the necks of down-ballot candidates.

“Our nominee is an absolute train wreck in the suburbs among more moderate voters,” said a state Republican Party executive director, who asked for anonymity to discuss the state of the race candidly.

The Republican National Committee (RNC) has invested millions of dollars in staff and data analytics meant to identify voters and get them to the polls. State parties have spent more than a year identifying voters and learning their political priorities in order to target them more efficiently — a sea change from the 2012 elections.

“We learned our lesson when we got our asses kicked in ’12,” said one battleground state Republican Party official. The GOP is investing less in phone calls and more in in-person door-knocking, the official said. “Phones don’t work. Doors do.”

The RNC has more than 1,000 paid staff and trained organizers on the ground in Florida, 663 in North Carolina and 439 in Ohio, said spokeswoman Lindsay Walters. Those staffers and volunteers are have been knocking on doors for months.

“The RNC’s significant and early investment in community organization and voter contact in key states across the country has placed our candidates in a strong position to win in November,” Walters said.

The in-person encounters give Republicans, especially those running in competitive states and districts, a window into the crisis they now face: Many voters, especially suburban Republican women and centrists who might lean right, are unwilling to support Trump.

The GOP must now convince those voters to show up to the polls anyway, even if they vote for Clinton or a third-party presidential candidate, in order to preserve Republican House and Senate majorities.

“Everybody knew this was going to be the situation,” the battleground state official said. “We’d be stupid if we didn’t see this coming a mile away.”

But even with those advances, meant to blunt the Democratic edge in technology, some within the GOP question their party’s ability to catch up. Democrats led by Clinton’s campaign are building on President Obama’s two successful White House bids.

In contrast, Republicans are saddled with a presidential nominee who has shown little interest in the sorts of data analytics meant to bank every possible vote.

“They’ve been building this campaign not only through the Obama years but through Hillary,” Mark Stephenson, who runs Red Oak Strategic, a leading Republican data and analytics firm, said of Democrats. On his side, he added: “The RNC has shouldered the load on almost all of that for the Trump campaign.”

As early voting begins and absentee ballots go out in key states around the nation — early vote stations opened Wednesday in Ohio — Republicans worry that time to close the gap is running out.

Elections officials have sent out more than 6 million ballots, and 565,000 voters have cast ballots by absentee or in person, according to data maintained by University of Florida political scientist Michael McDonald.

Republicans see encouraging signs in Iowa, where early returns show Democrats have returned about 30,000 more absentee ballots than the GOP. Republicans expect to win by a wide margin among voters who cast ballots on Election Day, and Democrats usually build a much larger margin among absentee voters in years they have won.

Ohio, where Sen. Rob Portman (R) has built his own turnout operation, is another bright spot, though polls have recently showed Clinton building a lead on Trump. Still, internal numbers on both sides show both Democrats and Republicans are requesting absentee ballots at a slower pace than in 2012.

But Democrats are building an edge in states like Florida and Pennsylvania. In Florida, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook has claimed unusual success in getting unlikely voters to the polls — a claim borne out even in GOP tracking data.

"Early vote is a fundamental component of our get out the vote effort and in many states, we're treating every day like election day,” said Lily Adams, a Clinton campaign spokeswoman. "We've always believed more Americans will vote early than ever before and now we have data that bears that out in critical states like North Carolina, Ohio and Florida."

Early voting has become a more integral part of each side’s strategy ahead of November. McDonald estimates more than 40 percent of all voters will cast their ballots before Election Day.

About a third of Ohio voters voted early in 2012; more than half of Florida voters, 62 percent of North Carolina voters and more than two-thirds of voters in Arizona and Nevada had cast ballots before Election Day four years ago.

In Colorado, the 2016 election will be the first presidential contest in which every voter automatically gets an absentee ballot.

Both parties use their data programs to convince voters to cast ballots early, which helps them narrow the universe of those who need to turn out on Election Day. When a voter casts a ballot, parties no longer need to convince them to vote, which means the voter’s name comes off their contact list.

The two parties “have a good idea of where the race is every single day,” Stephenson said. “They’ll know what’s going on in a lot of these places.”