Scott Presler Archives - Dr. Rich Swier

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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Reagan Reese

White House reporter. Follow Reagan on Twitter.

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First, smear opposition to jihad violence and Sharia oppression as “anti-Muslim.” Invoke the discredited far-Left smear propaganda organization, the Southern Poverty Law Center as if it were an infallible and impartial authority on what constitutes a “hate group.” Present the SPLC’s smears without any substantiating evidence, as if they were unquestionable fact. Throw in the word “extreme,” so as to abet the growing campaign to portray all dissent from the far-left agenda as terrorism.

Then drag in the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), identifying it only as a “civil rights organization,” without bothering to inform your readers that CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case — so named by the Justice Department. CAIR officials have repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. Several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror. CAIR’s cofounder and longtime Board chairman (Omar Ahmad), as well as its chief spokesman (Ibrahim Hooper), have made Islamic supremacist statements about how Islamic law should be imposed in the U.S. (Ahmad denies this, but the original reporter stands by her story.) CAIR chapters frequently distribute pamphlets telling Muslims not to cooperate with law enforcement. CAIR has opposed virtually every anti-terror measure that has been proposed or implemented and has been declared a terror organization by the United Arab Emirates. CAIR’s Hussam Ayloush in 2017 called for the overthrow of the U.S. government. CAIR’s national outreach manager is an open supporter of Hamas.

Note also that Presler isn’t even set to speak about anything related to Islam or jihad. Hamas-linked CAIR and far-left organs such as Orlando Weekly, or at least its reliably fascist writer Matthew Moyer, want to hound anyone who stands against them to their deaths. If you oppose jihad terrorism, Hamas-linked CAIR won’t just come after you if you ever speak about this in a public forum. It will come after you no matter what you’re doing, and try to intimidate event organizers, in this case CPAC, to drop you for your transgression of Sharia blasphemy provisions. If it were up to the left and Islamic supremacists, their critics would all be unemployed and unemployable, starving to death on the streets (at best). A few years ago I was invited to address an education conference in California that had nothing whatsoever to do with Islam; the hate-filled fascist “Islamophobia” propagandist-turned-real estate agent Nathan Lean got the weak and ignorant Catholic bishop Jaime Soto, under whose auspices the conference was being held, to cancel my appearance. (I spoke at the conference as scheduled, in a venue outside the bishop’s purview.) And also a few years ago, the Washington Post discovered that the Qur’an-burning pastor Terry Jones was driving for Uber; they duly got him fired. I don’t approve of book-burning, but it is not illegal in the United States, and the idea that a man must be hounded forever and prevented from making a living for views that dissent from the left’s reveals what Leftists really are.

So it has been clear for years that if you dissent from leftist orthodoxy, you must be destroyed. Not just “debunked” or “discredited” in your field, but also prevented from doing everything else, so that the only option you have is to die.

This smear of Presler is also ironic in light of the fact that when it comes to the jihad threat, CPAC, like all establishment conservative organizations, left the building years ago, barring all discussion of the actual nature and magnitude of the threat, and opting instead for comforting religion-of-peace fictions. This hit piece on Presler must have the cowardly Matt Schlapp quivering under his desk.

“CPAC speaker called out for anti-Muslim sentiments, and that’s only scratching the surface of this year’s spectacle,”

by Matthew Moyer, Orlando Weekly, February 25, 2021:

Another speaker on the lineup for the conservative mega-gathering CPAC is getting some unwelcome spotlight for anti-Muslim statements and activity, and this is only scratching the surface of the extreme ideologies being trotted out at this week’s event in Orlando.

On Tuesday, civil rights organization the Council on American-Islamic Relations called on CPAC organizers to remove Scott Presler from their conference lineup.

CAIR points out that Presler had been involved with “ACT for America” from 2017-2018 as an organizer. The Southern Poverty Law Center has characterized that organization as “an anti-Muslim hate group because it pushes wild anti-Muslim conspiracy theories, denigrates American Muslims and deliberately conflates mainstream and radical Islam.”

More recently, Presler was in Washington, D.C., for the Stop the Steal rally and even called the Jan. 6 insurrection the “largest civil rights protest in American history.”

Preslar is scheduled to participate in a group session on Saturday afternoon titled, ironically, “Front Porch Politics: How to Talk About Issues Without Starting a Back Alley Brawl.”

“CPAC organizers should immediately drop anti-Muslim activist Scott Presler, who has actively worked to promote conspiracy theories about American Muslims and Islam,” said CAIR Director of Government Affairs Department Robert S. McCaw. “Presler’s reported role in supporting the January 6 insurrection is enough to disqualify him from being offered a credible speaking platform.”…

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