At a sprawling campus in Phoenix, leaders of the influential conservative group Turning Point Action hatched plans to fix what they see as a deadly threat to the Republican Party: the avoidance of early voting, particularly by mail, by its voters since the 2020 election.
The group’s officials and many national Republicans fear that Democrats have gained a major strategic advantage by encouraging their voters to cast ballots early while GOP voters wait until Election Day. This phenomenon is largely due to former President Donald J. Trump’s persistent falsehoods about mail-in voting, at times amplified by Turning Point Action officials, and the deep skepticism they generated among conservative voters.
A solution is now urgently sought, with Turning Point Action at the forefront.
The group, which began as an insurgent organization of young Republicans and has become a powerful player in right-wing politics, aims to raise more than $108 million for a “Chase the Vote” program with hundreds of employees in Arizona and Wisconsin spend. You’ll follow a few simple steps: Identify Republican-leaning voters who didn’t vote in the last two elections. Build a personal connection with them over the next seven months. Then, in the group’s words, “chasing the ballots.”
Political diplomacy will be required.
“Each of you will have responsibilities for hundreds of people,” Tyler Bowyer, the group’s chief operating officer, told about 20 trainees last week. “Do you think wearing a MAGA hat will attract 50 percent of these people?”
The Chase the Vote program is one of the right’s largest and most expensive efforts to convince Republicans to vote early. Their broad departure from the practice that was popular in both parties before 2020 means Republican candidates are now far more exposed to Election Day problems such as bad weather, long lines or problems with voting machines.
At the same time, Turning Point Action’s program is still tied to strongly conservative views on early voting and mail-in voting. The group’s leaders are quick to express skepticism about the security of these practices, despite no evidence of widespread fraud, and call for tightening election laws.
Mr. Bowyer has publicly stated that his group is not trying to turn current Election Day voters into early voters. He says his main focus is to show low-turnout voters – those who didn’t vote in the last election – all the options they can have to cast their vote.
Charlie Kirk, the founder of the Turning Point empire, said in an interview: “It’s better to participate, even in this way” – that is, to vote early – “than not to participate at all. That’s our argument.”
Party-wide distrust, fueled by Trump
But improving Republican early turnout will be a challenge. Mr. Trump and his allies continue to argue that mail-in voting is rife with fraud.
During a Fox News town hall event last month, Mr. Trump told host Laura Ingraham: “If you vote by mail, you automatically have fraud.” At a rally in Wisconsin this week, he vowed to “vote the election through one-day voting.” to back up”.
The damage to Republicans in the Trump era is clear.
In the 2020 election, when many Americans voted by mail because of the pandemic, seven million more Democrats than Republicans voted early in the 20 states that track party data, according to the United States Elections Project. In the 2022 midterm elections, two million more Democrats than Republicans voted early in 24 states, according to the project, an advantage that relied almost entirely on mail-in voting. In each of those years, Republican candidates narrowly lost in crucial races.
According to a February Pew Research Center study, only 28 percent of Republicans support allowing every voter to cast their vote by mail if they want, compared to 84 percent of Democrats.
Recognizing this trend, the Republican National Committee this year launched a “Bank Your Vote” program that encourages early voting. In an interview with NBC News last month, Lara Trump, the committee’s new co-chair and Mr. Trump’s daughter-in-law, said: “We need to start encouraging Republican voters to do things like vote early, trust email. “when voting.”
Still, Mr. Trump has put the party in a difficult position. The RNC’s new leadership, hand-picked by Mr. Trump and his allies, initially signaled that it would abandon “Bank Your Vote” before changing course. Top Turning Point officials continue to criticize mail-in voting even as they lead their new “Chase the Vote” initiative.
“Threading the needle for us, the game that we have to play, that we have to figure out: How do we get a group of people who are deeply concerned about these processes that are being changed and manipulated to participate in those same processes. “ ?” Mr. Bowyer said in an interview, darkly referring to the unproven conservative theory that Democrats are intentionally changing election rules for their own benefit. (Mr. Bowyer was one of Arizona’s bogus voters in the 2020 election, a scheme the attorney general is currently investigating, according to the Washington Post.)
“Examination of conscience” because of republican discrimination
On Election Day in 2022, Mr. Kirk realized that things had to change.
When Mr. Kirk entered a polling station at a Phoenix church to proudly vote for Kari Lake and other Republicans, he was greeted by a two-and-a-half-hour line, largely due to broken machines. Other polling places in the area experienced similar problems.
In the end, Ms. Lake lost the race for governor by about 17,000 votes to Katie Hobbs, a Democrat. Around 19,000 more Democrats than Republicans voted by postal vote.
“That sparked a lot of soul-searching among our team,” Mr. Kirk said in an interview. “I asked the question, ‘What could we have done better?'”
He added, referring to the weeks-long period of early voting: “We could have done better in the voting month.”
That appears to be a significant public shift from Mr. Kirk, who wrote an essay for Fox News in July 2020 calling mail-in voting a Democratic power grab and who repeatedly reiterated the security of voting in social media posts around the 2020 election Postal voting was questioned.
In the interview Mr Kirk expressed these views. “There is understandable skepticism about filling out a valuable ballot that we take very seriously and sending it in the mail,” he said, adding that conservatives are not fans of the Postal Service.
Still, Mr. Kirk says, Republicans should be aware that they have a “buffet of choices.”
In a memo sent to donors last year, Turning Point Action said it hoped to hire more than 500 full-time “ballot hunters” in Arizona and 350 in Wisconsin. If the group reaches its entire $108 million goal — officials said they have raised “tens of millions” but still have a ways to go — it plans to expand into Georgia and possibly Michigan.
A mission to change Republican voting habits
The Turning Point effort is driven by a massive data operation led by Matthew Martinez, Chase the Vote’s data director and former field director for Ms. Lake’s campaign.
Mr. Martinez has settled into one of the cavernous rooms at the Turning Point headquarters in Phoenix, with four-by-six-foot whiteboards containing maps of states, counties and cities dotted with handwritten numbers. He methodically divided Arizona and Wisconsin by hand into his own precincts, townships and districts, identifying 400 to 600 low-leaning Republican voters in each district.
The voters who could put these states in the red, Martinez said, are not in traditional battlegrounds but in safely red districts like that of Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona.
“The current mindset for four years or more has been: flip, flip, flip,” Mr. Martinez said in an interview, referring to the party’s focus on hotly contested areas. “What I’m saying is we need to expand our base.”
The group also plans to use its Chase the Vote infrastructure for what it calls election integrity efforts. Mr. Bowyer said on a recent Turning Point podcast: “If there are people on the ground who become aware of voting habits,” then “it will be easier to clean up the voter rolls.”
Chase the Vote is still in its early stages and has only trained 20 of its ballot hunters so far. And while the new hires will face wary voters, top Turning Point officials will also have to contend with skeptical donors who tend to prefer writing big checks and seeing immediate returns in the form of flashy ads rather than the boring work of a new and fundable donor to finance untested field use.
Just as the trainees took a break to enjoy an In-N-Out Burger lunch, Mr. Kirk was across the hall, meeting with four major donors.
“It’s kind of a muscle memory challenge that on election day we can keep trying to flood the voting zone, keep expecting to win and lose on the margins,” he said in the interview. “So if you’re lagging on the edges and you want to get the win, and there’s this huge 30- to 40-day window where the opponent is dominating and you’re not even playing, that’s rational in that 30- to 40-day period window to do something and then try to be coherent and successful.”
Mr. Kirk said he plans to vote early in person in the fall and capture it on video.
“We have to be Ned Flanders”
Reaching out to these low-propensity voters is part of what political activists call “relational organizing,” a trendy political term that means using personal, one-on-one contacts instead of mass messaging like ads.
During the training, Mr. Bowyer repeatedly showed a picture of Ned Flanders, the relentlessly friendly character from “The Simpsons,” greeting neighbors with a “Hello-diddily-ho.”
“We have to be Ned Flanders,” he said.
Mr Bowyer has stressed the importance of appearing “human” – not always an easy task within a movement fueled by Trump discontent.
In a recent Turning Point podcast, he urged listeners “not to be mean, angry, aggressive and tell people they’re stupid.”
He added: “Look, if we went up to people and said, ‘Oh, you’re on the early voter list? You’re an idiot.’ Do you think they are more motivated to vote? Do you think they are more motivated to become voters on Election Day? And that’s exactly what’s happening right now.”
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2024-04-08 02:56:34
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