Hunters, Truckers And The Amish: Inside Republicans’ ‘Aggressive’ New Ballot-Chasing Plan For November
Come November, every hunter, trucker and Amish person across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania will have a ballot in their hands if the GOP’s expansive get-out-the-vote (GOTV) effort goes according to plan.
For years there have been restrictions on how the Republican National Committee (RNC) and presidential campaigns could work with door-knocking groups. That all changed in March when a Federal Election Commission (FEC) advisory opinion eased restrictions on coordination between such groups.
Now, a large portion of Republicans’ GOTV efforts are being outsourced to prominent conservative organizations, who are running an aggressive ground game across several states including Arizona, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the Daily Caller learned.
“80,000 votes [in Pennsylvania] decided 2020, so let’s break that down. There are 90,000 Amish in Pennsylvania. That is the election. So we are courting the Amish vote, and we’re going to farmers markets, and we’re going to their villages, their towns. We’re meeting them where they are,” Scott Presler, the founder of Early Vote Action, told the Caller.
“There are 80,000 truckers in Pennsylvania … a lot of them don’t vote because they’re driving rigs on election day. So we’re trying to get them the mail-in ballot. We’re trying to get them to vote early, because if they’re driving how are they going to vote? That 80,000 number could very well win Pennsylvania,” he continued.
As of a few months ago, the RNC has also been coordinating with Turning Point Action on its GOTV efforts, a GOP spokesperson told the Caller. Various other groups that work with Turning Point Action, including Presler’s Early Vote Action and Cliff Maloney’s The Pennsylvania Chase, are in frequent communication with the party about its work and consistently share data as the election nears, they told the Caller.
“We are in lockstep with the party. We are in lockstep with the statewide campaigns, and we are doing everything we can legally to coordinate and to share data so that we are all working in harmony,” Maloney told the Caller.
Turning Point Action is heading up a considerable amount of the get-out-the-vote efforts across the country as it works to replicate the Democratic Party’s “hub and spoke model,” a spokesperson told the Caller. On the right, the RNC is playing “quarterback” and overseeing the GOTV operation while the grassroots organizations focus on their specialties and periodically meet with the party to provide updates.
Following the 2022 election, Turning Point Action, just a fraction of the size it is now, decided it was time to get serious about its GOTV work. The new Trump-endorsed RNC leadership, the organization told the Caller, has been willing to support ground game programs — something the group did not have previously.
To bulk up its efforts, Turning Point Action built up an app that provides information on who in an area is a low-propensity voter. When that voter is identified, the app users are provided scripts for door-to-door work, postcards and text messages to use to approach the individual.
A Turning Point Action spokesperson told the Caller that the organization has hundreds of full-time staff members devoted to the get-out-the-vote effort in Arizona and Wisconsin. The spokesperson added that the organization is ramping up its initiative in Michigan, a pivot from its initial plan of focusing on Georgia, because it saw more opportunities in the Wolverine state.
“There are 400 to 600 low propensity voters within a territory. And we put a full-time body on that territory and their goal is to knock on the doors of 400 to 600 low-propensity voters, get to know them, and be a good neighbor and a resource to them. For every 18-20 ballot chaser we assign a manager as their direct report, and then that goes up to a state director, and then an enterprise director. Everyone is accountable up and down the process,” the spokesperson told the Caller.
While Turning Point Action focuses its staff primarily on Arizona and Wisconsin, other organizations are using the app to target other states. In Pennsylvania, which both Democrats and Republicans have identified as one of the most important states in the election, Presler and Maloney are deploying a complex effort.
Using its own app modeled after Turning Point Action’s, Presler’s Early Vote Action is targeting key demographics, such as the Amish, truckers, veterans and hunters, that he believes have the ability to flip the state red. Presler explained that the state of Pennsylvania has 800,000 veterans and 930,000 hunters, but 30% of those hunters are not registered to vote.
“With that number being larger than 300,000 when the state was lost by 80,000, it very well could be hunters and gun owners and gun enthusiasts that save the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,” Presler told the Caller.
“So we, for the last year and a half, have made a direct effort, going to the Monroeville Gun Show, to the great American outdoor Gun Show, to the Philly Expo Center, going to every single gun show, gun store, gun range, meeting hunters where they are, and really courting their vote,” he continued.
Similarly to Turning Point Action’s app, Presler’s gives its 30,000 users the ability to call, text and write postcards from anywhere in the country to low-propensity voters in states like Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
“One woman in particular, her name is Marcella. She has written over 2,500 handwritten postcards as a grandma from California into Pennsylvania alone,” Presler said.
While Presler focuses on getting ballots in the hands of thousands of Pennsylvanians, Maloney’s group is gearing up to chase the vote into the ballot box.
“We’re hiring 120 full-time ballot chasers September one through Election Day. We’re knocking on 500,000 doors, and specifically doors where Republicans have a mail-in ballot sitting on their dining room table,” Maloney told the Caller. “That’s important because if you look back to 2020, Trump lost by 80,000 votes, 141,000 Republicans — I’m not even including independent Republicans — 141,000 Republicans requested a ballot. They got the ballot and they never sent it back. And why would they? Nobody knocked on their door.”
Beginning on Sept. 1, those 120 ballot chasers will be dispatched to ten locations across the state where they will go door-to-door. Until then, Maloney will continue fundraising for the operation. The group sits just a half a million dollars away from its goal of $2.5 million.
As the RNC expands its field operations and grassroots organizations handle the ground game, the party is also focused on election integrity efforts.
Before the RNC leadership change, legal experts expressed concerns about the state of the election integrity landscape. In March, a Daily Caller analysis found that a number of key battleground states, including those that delivered Biden the presidency, were poised to use many of the election procedures in 2024 that outraged Republicans in 2020.
Since Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara and North Carolina GOP Chairman Michael Whatley assumed leadership of the party, the GOP has filed numerous lawsuits, many regarding states’ voter rolls.
“The Trump campaign and the RNC are much better prepared this time, and while there’s a lot of work to be done, they’ve done a very good job of hiring the right team and devoting the right resources,” Mike Davis, a former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and founder of the Article 3 Project, previously told the Caller.
Despite the RNC’s extensive work, some laws remain in place — but Maloney says that’s okay, it just makes their work more crucial.
“In Pennsylvania, there’s now 50 days of vote by mail, which is just insane, but it’s reality. So you got to play by the current rules. And I think for a while, we were hoping the lawmakers would change it. They didn’t. We were hoping the courts would change it. They didn’t,” Maloney told the Caller. “And now I think we’re just looking in the mirror saying ‘it’s time to go to war.’”
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