If you want to win the war, you’d better have a great ground game.  ,
Democrats have had to work for a long time to understand the fundamental truth about the political battle, which frequently results in painful defeats. However, some grass liberal organizations managed to win the most recent election cycle, and the soldiers they deployed in conflicts across the seven battleground state appear to have had a significant influence on the results of this season’s political vote.  ,
Taking a page from the successful ground game playbook in Florida’s successful 2022 elections, American Majority Action ( AMA ) developed and launched a blanketing ballot-chasing initiative in four swing states — Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin. The traditional grassroots nonprofit urged and enticing low-moderate propensity voters to vote early and to encourage them to do so. They are conservatives who rarely or never do so.  ,
More fish in the pond is needed.
Through countless contacts and sustained partnership building, AMA helped reduce the significant absent ballot/early election surpluses that Democrats and leftist protesters have created in previous Wisconsin elections, giving Democrats a clear edge on the ballot in Arizona, Nevada, and North Carolina.  ,
In the end, past President Donald Trump won all seven battleground state, reversing small losses suffered in 2020 in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. And the GOP nominee’s margin of victory in 2020 is more than doubled as he moves to success in North Carolina.  , While the Republican Senate candidates in Arizona, Nevada, and Wisconsin did n’t come out victorious, the data show that in Wisconsin in particular challenger Eric Hovde benefited from a boost in lower-participation conservative voters. In what turned out to be Baldwin’s narrowest election victory, the Madison Republican business came in less than 30 000 votes from defeating the far-left president.  ,
” Being able to attend earlier really changed my opinion. You simply set yourself up little better to win on the Election Day vote”, Matt Batzel, executive director of American Majority Action, told me Thursday on the” Vicki McKenna Show” in Milwaukee.  ,
Batzel compared stocking the pond to fishing, as a great Wisconsinite do.  ,
” If you want to get more fish or win an election, you’ve got to set more fish in the pond”, he said. ” You’ve got to first of all generate more absentee ballots, you’ve got to find your less good citizens to participate”.
But getting out the lower-participation vote and getting them out before takes day, wealth and plenty of persistence. That’s what Florida needed to turn the state crimson, and that’s exactly what the founder of American Majority Action saw as necessary on a larger scale to succeed in 2024 following humiliating losses in 2022.  ,
‘ Trade’ the Florida Model ,
American Majority CEO Ned Ryun said he had an epiphany after picking himself up from the floor during the dark wave-less semester elections. He claimed that it would have been better to have spoken out early in the 2022 poll period to save a dubious election cycle.  ,
” We need to import the Florida GOP’s absentee-ballot fight system into these crucial battleground state in 2024″, Ryun told The Federalist in late September.
Florida is today a credible red, unlike the position where it used to be. Some of the social shifts in recent years may be attributed to the enormous migration of Americans from quarantine states to free condition Florida during Covid. There are a number of factors, but the truth is that for the first time in Sunshine State past, registered Republicans won over registered Democrats in the election period.  ,
And it’s not even similar.  ,
” Florida has 1 million more Republican registered voters than Liberals, elections officials revealed, further cementing its reputation as a traditional beehive”, the Associated Press, Pravda Press key, lamented in August.  ,
Democratic registration rolls have been growing for a while, but Governor of Florida turned the tables red in 2022. Ron DeSantis kicked the stuffing out of RINO-turned-independent-turned-Democrat Charlie Crist — Florida’s government a long time ago.  ,
” An hours after polls closed in most of Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis ‘ election was guaranteed”, the Tampa Bay Times reported in a what happened to Florida Democrats? account.  ,
His percentage would only increase by the end of the night, allowing him to defeat his Democrat rival and former Florida governor by 19 details. Charlie Crist. In a broad success, DeSantis even flipped trusted blue counties like Miami-Dade and Palm Beach”, the bit noted.  ,
Consultant Shannon Love told the release there’s” no key” to the Republicans ‘ success.
” They do the job. Love said,” I believe Democrats get swept up in the text and the elections rather than doing the right thing.”  ,
‘ Super Citizens ‘
Ryun was impressed by the Florida GOP ground game, which aimed to increase absentee ballots among those who did n’t vote and ensure that no less than 80 % of those ballots were returned. That appears to be the secret range, Ryun said, between winning and losing. He claimed that anything that returns for 80 % of the competition makes it significantly harder to take it.
In January 2023, I addressed donors and stated that we must conduct this in significant battleground state. We need to generate more ballots among mid-to-low props ( propensity ), because we know that if you take a mid-to-low propensity voter and get them to request a ballot, 80 percent of the time they’re going to vote in the next election”, Ryun said. You can use them to create a larger ballot universe, create a stronger ballot chase, and finally put together pieces for a strong ballot chase.
The liberal activist called it” a number of arbitrary abuse.” The ballot-chasing campaign includes door pulls, phone calls, writings, cards, digital communication and more — all to constantly remind would-be electors to go get their votes. The work, when done correctly, drastically reduces Democrats ‘ traditional early and absentee lead.  ,
A little over a fortnight before the general election, Ryun said,” so that when Donald Trump crushes on Election Day, where typically Republicans usually demolish Democrats ]in turnout], he wins reelection by winning most, if not all of these, seven essential says.”  ,
That’s exactly what happened.  ,
Three Times Better Position
AMA’s estimates for Wisconsin indicate that Trump entered the first ballot period with about 200, 000 vote, based on Marquette Law School Poll absentee and earlier in-person election information. Batzel said that may seem like a lot of ground to cover. But examine Trump’s 2024 gap to the 600, 000-plus early-vote vote benefits Democrat Joe Biden held over Trump in Wisconsin in the 2020 presidential election, a gap the leader could not quite overcome.  ,
” So to be in three times better position, a three times smaller lead for Democrats heading into Election Day, and we know we’re going to win]turnout on ] Election Day, that was such a big indicator that we were in a good position”, Batzel said.  ,
In Nevada, AMA’s 300 ballot chasers focused on the Silver State’s largest county, Clark County, home to Las Vegas. In a state with universal vote-by-mail, the voter participation drive helped Republicans secure a lead of more than 43, 000 votes going into Election Day, according to AMA’s data. The effort, the organization reports, also was a significant factor in Republicans winning all 14 days of early in-person voting.  ,
Republicans are the first to cast more early ballots in North Carolina than Democrats. According to American Majority, the project’s outreach efforts directly contributed to the production of 50 000 absentee ballots.
And AMA says it assembled a network of more than 500 volunteers for door knocking, phone banking, and text outreach in Arizona. Based on AMA ‘s , review, Trump entered Election Day up by north of 130, 000 votes, bolstering confidence that “leans-red” Arizona would be counted in Trump’s column.  ,
The four-state effort took millions of door knocks, phone calls, texts and reminder postcards, according to AMA.  ,
One Key Player
The Sentinel Action Fund and its partners had similar results with their ballot-chasing campaign in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Montana, as The Federalist reported earlier this month. Sentinel, too, targeted and turned out hundreds of thousands of mid-to-low propensity voters to cast ballots early, cutting deeply into Democrat absentee ballot/early voting leaders.  ,
The super PAC, which is led by conservative grassroots activist Jessica Anderson and supported by Tennessee Republican Senator Bill Hagerty, is credited with facilitating the Senate’s next session’s comfortable majority. Democrats ‘ incumbents were defeated by Republican challengers in all three states, giving the GOP 53 seats starting January.  ,
Without the support of one key player, Anderson and Ryun agreed that the ballot-chasing efforts would not have been nearly as successful.  ,
In the best of times, it’s difficult to get conservatives ‘ early votes. Republicans were understandably jaded on election day voting following the rigged 2020 election, in which liberals used Covid to win a sizable crop of early and mail-in votes.  ,
Without the support of one key player, Donald Trump, Anderson and Ryun agreed that their ballot-chasing efforts would not have been nearly as successful. They gave credit to Susie Wiles, co-chair of Trump’s campaign, and James Blair, the campaign’s political director, for convincing the now president-elect to put his loathing of mail-in ballots aside and beat Democrats at their own game.  ,
People thought we were crazy, right?
The conservative ballot-shuffling receives a lot of vindication here. In the closing weeks of the election, a narrative had emerged in the corporate media about the Trump campaign’s “paltry” ground game. Despite some in the GOP’s grousing, organizations like the Sentinel Action Fund, American Majority, and Turning Point Action were attempting to upend Democrats in their own ranks.
Last month, The Associated Press , reported , that it had “obtained an unvarnished look at how Turning Point is promoting its strategy” via recordings of the conservative group’s presentations to” state and local Republican officials”. Some Republican strategists criticized the Trump campaign’s decision to rely on “untested groups” to chase ballots, according to the AP article.  ,
” Their strategy is bad. They know how to talk MAGA, they know how to message the base”, Tyler Montague, a Republican strategist from Arizona and a “longtime Turning Point critic“, reportedly told the accomplice news outlet. They “need not know what to say to a swing voter,” they claim. They alienate these people”.
Andrew Kolvet, spokesman for Turning Point ‘s , Chase the Vote Initiative, “rebuffed such criticism”, according to the AP.  ,
” We did this because we knew conservatives need” a get-out-the-vote strategy, he reportedly said.
One national party leader called the views of sour grapes strategists unconstitutional.
A RNC official at the time told The Federalist on background that” Republican strategists who complain about the ground game do so because they are uninvolved.”
He applauded the efforts of the various players who had” the most robust and comprehensive ground game” he had seen in 15 years.
” People thought we were crazy. Why would we give away people who do n’t vote with all of their time and effort? The RNC official said,” If we give them more than the time of day, they will come out and vote for us.”  ,
The campaign was n’t about identity. Everybody knows Trump. Everyone knows Biden and, by extension and the Democratic National Committee’s soft coup, Kamala Harris. The bank had high-propensity voters in the background, according to RNC officials. The disappointed lower-participation voters who want to re-enter the game  with a few nudges would make the difference.  ,
Then it came to tailoring the message to those voters.
” If you saw the early vote numbers in places like Virginia, red strongholds in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, some of these lines were hours and hours long. Those were our low props, our low-propensity voters”, the RNC official said.  ,
About 1: 30 a. m. on Election Night, the doubters disappeared, he said.  ,
” You did n’t hear another peep out of them. In fact, we have n’t heard from them since”, the source said.  ,
‘ Stock the Pond ‘
Ryun argued that 2024 demonstrated the value of encouraging early voting among low-participation voters. Now, he said, the trick is to keep them engaged.  ,
He said,” We have to figure out how to turn Trump’s early voters into more active and consistent voters for anyone on the ticket.” ” If we do n’t, we’ll lose tens of thousands of them in the elections ahead” . ,
Batzel argued that learning from the successes must first be the first step. The most important lesson, he said, is that a good ground game is about face-to-face communications and constant contact.  ,
” We can continue to learn lessons, improve the system, get more groups to buy in and get involved, especially in absentee ballot generation, not just chasing”, AMA’s executive director said. ” You have to generate. You have to stock the pond with more fish, and we have the opportunity to do that this spring ]Wisconsin Supreme Court election ] and for election cycles to come” . ,
The Federalist’s senior elections correspondent, Matt Kittle, is. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
