Apparently a big part of Elons attempts at voter outreach for Trump were to encourage “bullet ballot” votes (only voting for the president and leaving everything else blank), which is also what caused some scare about potential voter fraud when the very large increase of bullet ballots were noticed. He had teams of people reaching out to “low propensity voters” and trying to convince them to simply show up and vote for Trump, not to worry about knowing anything else. So that actually worked in Trump’s and Musks favor as far as simply getting them in, but there was little consideration for the state that would leave the party in.

(My personal bias would say neither Trump nor Musk give two shits about Republicans, or anyone but themselves, so Musk gets the position to further enrich himself and protection from investigation he wanted and Trump gets the same.)

There is also the issue of the media, when a fox news or the like paints Trump as dogmatic savior, only he can save you, then that leaves a lot of people feeling like only he matters so they don’t pay much attention to who else they should vote for.