Kind of.
It’s a tried and true method of managing limited resources for a specific deadline to achieve better results at lower cost. This, btw, has been proven by the PMI studies conducted on Israeli elections.
Campaigns are, quite literally used by many project management classes, as a classic example of a “project”. You have a hard deadline (election day), numerous “gating” deadlines leading up to that, numerous stake holders involved(different constituent groups, endorsement seeking, fund raising, etc), limited resources in time, people and money. And given the hard deadline, a strategy that needs to be strongly adhered to throughout.
There are strong operational management, communications management, risk management, legal/regulations management, and change management components of a campaign, all of which are covered by project management disciplines.
And, from a larger “program management” perspective, there is a gigantic need to do post mortems/quality assurance reviews on the back end to adjust for future campaigns. (This step is almost never done, which is why Democratic campaigns put as much emphasis on phone banking in recent years as they did in 2008…despite the response rate basically falling off a cliff since then).
And given that general chaos that pounds against a campaign, the need to stick to the strategy and the project time line are paramount.
I can go through a bunch of different, specific examples, where taking a project management approach would result in significant improvements in managing campaigns and managing field organizations. And yet, every time I mention “Gannt Charts” to campaign staff, they look at me like I am speaking in tongues.