Scott Presler, though unfailingly polite in conversation, isn’t afraid to speak bluntly about the massive threat conservatives face in 2024.
“It’s my contention that, currently, Joe Biden is cruising to reelection if we don’t have the infrastructure necessary, with things such as voter registration, early voting, legal ballot harvesting,” the Millennial Republican activist told The Epoch Times earlier this month.
“If we don’t have those things, then a Republican is simply not able to win.”
Presler is among the political insiders and analysts who told The Epoch Times that Republican Party leaders and candidates need to change course now if they want to win the presidency and other coveted political prizes in the 2024 election.
Many conservatives expressed distrust of those methods, believing they could be vulnerable to manipulation and cheating. But ballot harvesting can also be seen as a safeguard against sometimes inevitable life circumstances that prevent people from making it to the ballot box on Election Day: a broken down car, a medical emergency, death in the family, or something as simple as a memory lapse on a busy day.
To avoid some of such attrition, groups and campaigns have employed “ballot chasing,” a practice of following up with likely voters to make sure they cast ballots.
“The Left has built a well-oiled machine to absentee ballot harvest and chase. The Right has fallen behind significantly. And if this strategic gap isn’t filled quickly, our future is bleak,” the video says.
“The political battlefield has changed drastically since 2016,” says FreedomWorks, noting that more than 70 percent of ballots cast during the 2020 election were cast before Election Day. “We may not like this trend, but it’s accelerating.”
Mobilizer Ignored?
Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, a nonprofit group for young conservatives, dislikes seeing Republican candidates spending lots of money on negative TV advertisements. He thinks the money would be more wisely spent to help inspirational mobilizers such as Presler.
With more than a million followers on Twitter, Presler delivers a popular, uplifting message for the Republican base. He’s the type of grassroots activist you’d assume that Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee (RNC) chairwoman, would be eager to know.
Yet Presler says McDaniel has not responded to his repeated and ongoing attempts to contact her. For more than two months, he has sent messages to McDaniel via social media, text, and email—to no avail.
“There’s been no communication from the chairwoman or the RNC,” he told The Epoch Times. “I’m a team player, and I’m a collaborator. And look, at the end of the day, I’m here to win and make Joe Biden a one-term president. If the chairwoman were to call me, I would immediately take the call.”
The Epoch Times sought comment from McDaniel without success.
After considerable pressure from Presler and other prominent Republican voices, McDaniel and the RNC recently announced a program to secure more Republican votes.
‘Machinery’ Needed
With Republican infighting over 2024 heating up, Presler is calling for unity.“The enemy is not amongst us. And really, the enemy isn’t even the Democrats,” he said. “But what we do know is that Joe Biden has been a reckless president who’s putting national and global security at risk.”
Decisive steps must be taken now, Presler said.
“2024 is being decided now by the community organizers,” Kirk wrote. “We can beat them if we invest early in the machinery that will make the difference. Ignore the noise. Build the machine to win.”
Presler, Kirk, and others argue that the Republican Party’s problems with reaching and activating supporters are symptomatic of more profound deficiencies. Democrats seem to have a more organized, solidified network of support.
“They have these nonprofit organizations,” Presler said. “And they’re all working in solidarity with the same message of either voter registration or data collection, and then ultimately mobilizing those people based on that data.”
In his view, the RNC needs to do the same.
Not a Lost Cause
Across the nation, disconnected from the RNC, many individuals and small groups are pitching in, hoping their work to educate, register, and activate voters will move the needle for Republicans.Some of these efforts are concentrated in states that conservatives have largely “written off.”
Trump, who touts an “America First” agenda, lost Virginia to Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016, but won the presidency; in 2020, he lost the state and the presidency to Biden.
“We were founded with the twin missions of ensuring election integrity and registering and turning out to vote disaffected patriotic Americans of rural and blue-collar backgrounds,” LAA’s founder, Matt Braynard, wrote in a May memo outlining the group’s voter turnout project in Virginia.
While much attention is devoted to the 2024 presidential race, LAA is spotlighting state and local contests. The state senate is two seats shy of securing a Republican majority.
“There’s a lot at stake in Virginia this year,” said Camacho. “It’s very possible that the Senate could be flipped ... and it’s kind of a ’swingy' state.”
If that “flip” happens, it would give Republicans full control of the state government—and the Republican presidential nominee might benefit from that additional clout and attention in the 2024 election.
Started in 2017, LAA is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, a type of group that the Left has long used to increase voter turnout, Camacho said. He noted that such organizations have many built-in advantages, including “the ability to raise unlimited tax-deductible money from any source...without having to disclose information about donors.”
Negative vs. Positive Gain
LAA is working on not only registering voters but “getting them to vote, whether it’s going early, whether it’s going by mail, whether it’s voting in person,” Camacho said.It’s a tough sell lately, as people remain concerned about election improprieties making their votes moot. “Many people feel that their vote does not matter and it doesn’t make a difference—and that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he said.
“You hear so many people talking about voter fraud and voter integrity, voter cheating and all this kind of stuff. And yes, it does happen. And working on that and cleaning that up absolutely does need to happen,” Camacho said. “But I would say that’s ‘negative gain.’”
It’s important to also concentrate on “positive gain,” adding new voters to the rolls, he said.
A private donor has contributed funds for the Virginia turnout effort as a pilot project. “If we can show an effective model in 2023 in Virginia, then we can, ideally, raise funds to expand across the country for the 2024 general election,” Camacho said.
LAA’s campaign is multifaceted. The group intends to hit disengaged voters with repeated messages about the importance of voting. They will contact voters via door-to-door canvassing, direct mail, live phone calls, texting, and social media.
“Because our efforts include registering these voters for the state’s permanent absentee list, we believe many of them will continue voting for many elections to come,” Braynard’s plan states.
‘Sick of Failing’
Columnist Kurt Schlichter is one of the well-known conservatives putting pressure on McDaniel and other Republican leaders to step up their game.In a June 1 article on Townhall.com, Schlichter said Republicans are “sick of failing, exhausted by defeat, and looking back longingly to the time not so long ago when we were tired of all the winning.”
He said he has yet to see any plan from the RNC for correcting its course and harnessing workhorses such as Presler.
“This guy [Presler] is busting his hump doing the hard, tiring work of exactly the kind that Ronna should be organizing, and she’s ignoring him. Which means she is ignoring us,” Schlichter wrote.
“We have to win in 2024—have to. The left is not the moderate (in today’s terms) liberals of yesteryear but a collection of hardcore, commie-curious aspiring tyrants who want us, at best, defeated, disarmed, and disenfranchised,” Schlichter wrote, adding, “the more aggressive of them want us dead.”
He said the next election “is serious business, not merely some notional competition between Beltway teams ... It’s a big deal, and we need a serious effort to fix the administrative and logistical problems that plague our party.”
Lessons From Democrats
Academics with expertise in American politics say Republicans should have learned from their past mistakes.Democratic consultant David Carlucci said the 2022 election should have been a wake-up call for Republicans when it comes to capturing voters—and votes.
“Major political events like the Mar-a-Lago raid did little to change public opinion for either end of the political spectrum,” Carlucci said, referring to the FBI’s search of Trump’s Florida home on Aug. 8, 2022, two months before the November general election.
“This means that the only factor that could change the outcome of the 2022 midterms was which party got their base to get out and vote,” he told The Epoch Times.
“The Republicans’ greatest weakness this cycle was the blatant hostility toward the modern voting system,” Carlucci said. “Skepticism about ’stolen elections,' early voting, and mail-in ballots, in turn, demobilized the Republican base.”
“On the other hand, Democrats ran with the modern reality of voting to bring in a higher turnout than expected,“ he said. ”It might seem obvious, but a candidate only wins an election by getting more votes than their opponent.”
How 2024 Differs From 2022
He said the “obvious” plan for Republicans, post-2022, is twofold: First, to ensure strict adherence to election rules with “squadrons of lawyers.” Second, to assemble “extensive mobilization organizations, especially in swing states, to get out the vote of those leaning or likely leaning toward the Republicans, but might not otherwise bother to vote,” he said.“I don’t know what McDaniel is doing about this, but I cannot imagine anything more important for the Republicans—especially after they were caught flat-footed in the midterm,” Campbell added.
Going into the 2024 contest, “Republicans need to raise a ton of money, allocate it to the right states (follow the Democrats), and spend it wisely to track down those who are inclined towards them,” Campbell wrote.
He thinks Democrats still have an advantage because “they have organizational structures that might be adapted to mobilization campaigns (unions, government workers, teachers, etc.).” Republicans are appealing to working-class and non-college-educated voters, segments of the population that are harder to reach en masse.
But at least some elements of the 2024 picture look more favorable for the GOP than they did in 2022, Campbell said.
“Democrats will be defending about twice as many [Senate] seats as Republicans,” he said.
“At this point, the Republican nomination seems likely to be the more divisive,” Campbell said, “but President Biden’s age and controversies may shake up that nomination process as well.”
