There is a big difference between “votes” and “ballots.”  The Republicans focused on winning votes; the Democrats focused on gathering ballots. The ballots won. – Conservative Treehouse, November 2022

The were three areas the GOP needed to do to beat the Democrat cheating in 2024, summarised in Part 1 of this series. They were:

  1. Building a legal machine to challenge that of the Democrats everywhere all the time. (see Part 2)
  2. Ensuring voter integrity (see Part 3)
  3. Building a Get-Out-The-Vote machine.

Building a Get-Out-The-Vote machine

Despite all the efforts at building up a huge legal machine to hit Democrat cheating in actual voting, getting changes in laws to tighten up the rules on mail-in ballots and ballot harvesting, plus the mammoth effort to force swing states especially to clean ineligible voters off the rolls, there was one final piece of the system that had to be re-built.

The GOTV or Get-Out-The-Vote machine.

There had been a time in the 1970’s through the 2000’s when the Democrats grudgingly admired the GOP GOTV effort. But the arrival of the slick, well-funded Obama campaign changed everything. They fully embraced new technology in their election infrastructure, funded by the Silicon Valley billionaires who adored Obama, that enabled them to focus in on voters with unprecedented information.

My favourite example of this came from Michigan in 2012. One night a local GOP County Chairman opened his door to find two Obama volunteers standing there, all decked out in campaign rosettes and such. What are you thinking he asked, you must know who I am in this area. They did know, they said, but they were there to talk to his wife, not him. Bemused, he called his wife to the door and after her conversation with them ended (they didn’t get her vote) he began to analyse what had drawn them there. He realised that although she was a registered Republican she was also a primary school teacher who donated to various child charity groups, together with involvement with other community groups. The Democrats gigantic Catalist database had pulled all that information together, concluded that she was a potential Obama voter (even with the GOP registration) and instructed these two volunteers, via cellphone text, to go see her.

The GOP campaign of Mitt Romney looked like an oxcart compared to that – and actually broke down on election day.

Trump’s election victory in 2016 stymied the changes for a while and he actually had a useless ground game, one of the reasons I and many others thought he’d lose. He ended up winning because Hillary was more hated than him.

But 2020 was a harsh reminder that the GOP had learned nothing from 2012. Catalist was still around and more potent than ever as the Internet of Google, X and Facebook that had grown so much in the previous decade, provided even more detailed information about people. Add to that the massive funding of Zuckerberg and company to flood swing states with volunteers for ballot-harvesting and the like and the GOP’s failure to respond to any of these, focusing on the old methods that had served Reagan, Gingrich and Bush so well, and it added up to a crushing defeat on the ground.

In mid-2023 one article asked bluntly, Why Are Republicans Greenhorns at Rounding Up Them Absentee Votes?

“I can’t begin to understand what ballot harvesting is,” Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the former Republican House Speaker, said in an interview in the wake of a 2018 political upset in Orange County, California. Democrats had swept the congressional seats in one of California’s few Republican strongholds, largely due to a well-executed strategy of harvesting, or the collection and submission of ballots by someone other than the voter…After enacting new voting rules in 2016 that allowed harvesting, California Democrats in the 2018 midterms dispatched volunteers and paid staffers to neighborhoods rich in registered Democrats who had received an absentee ballot but had not returned it. Some of the agents collected up to 200 ballots at a time and turned them in for counting.  

Paul Ryan was a very smart policy wonk – as he showed in publicly dismantling Obamacare in front of a steamed Obama during a public session. But he was a very stupid politician. Sadly he was not alone in the GOP on this matter:

“Strangers going door-to-door met with a ton of resistance from Republican voters,” the official said. He was referring to a strategy shift in 2016 when “the RNC changed its field structure to resemble the work that the Obama campaign did in 2008 and 2012 by focusing on training people to be organizers, to put together teams that were part of the community.”

It turned out that, with Republicans tending to live in suburban developments, soliciting was frowned upon, and even prohibited, while the Democrats were, as ever, more welcome in urban settings, visiting apartment buildings, public libraries, and residential centers. With even McDaniel still saying she doesn’t like absentee voting, not every Republican official is embracing the message.

Ronna Romney McDaniel again, whose endless failures were documented in Part 1 of this series. But some GOP’rs realised what had to be done, starting with the first victims in California:

“We got our asses handed to us,” said Jessica Millan Patterson, chair of California’s Republican Party, whose 2019 election to office was in part based on her vow to embrace harvesting for the party and avenge the Orange County defeat. “Democrats in California have normalized what would be considered voter fraud in the rest of the country. If I had my way, harvesting would be illegal, but we have to win more elections if we want to change laws.”

You can read the rest of the gory details at that link, complete with the details about how Democrats and “progressive” groups, backed by $1 billion for this effort alone, gained influence over election administrations through private grants, conferences and the designing of election materials including ballot applications and election department websites (just imagine the MSM uproar if GOP groups did that), all with an emphasis on voter recruitment and repeating Democratic talking points, such as purported “misinformation” and alleged “threats to democracy.” – of course.

As the following article explains, at the core of the Democrat GOTV efforts was something called the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), a little-known Chicago nonprofit, which was the recipient of much of that billion dollars, including an estimated $350 million from Mark Zuckerberg:

CTCL then funneled that cash to thousands of local election offices in the form of COVID “relief” grants to boost mail-in voting, absentee ballot processing, unmonitored ballot drop boxes, and related items.
…
On a per-person (per capita) basis, these grants always overwhelmingly flowed to Democratic vote-rich cities like Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Phoenix, not to Trump counties.
…
Per person, CTCL grants averaged just $0.55 in Trump counties versus $3.75 in Biden counties. That was probably enough to give the state to Biden, considering his margin in Wisconsin was 20,682 votes.

By 2024 the GOP had managed to get such private funding of government election operations made illegal in many more states than the 27 where it had been illegal in 2020. Before 2020, no one had ever tried it anywhere, so in 23 states there were no laws in place blocking CTCL’s plan. Talk about a “dark money” loophole.

Even so, the Democrats continued to get a much better bang for their bucks, as this article from April 2024 explained, with a continued focus on election infrastructure, even without Zuckerberg, while the GOP simply threw money at candidates:

When Republicans still held power in Colorado, Democracy Alliance’s state affiliate began “pop-up” dark money groups to gather funding and built infrastructure to target Republican incumbents. The approach worked in the 2008 elections, leading Democrats to eventual dominance in the state.

The Democracy Alliance quickly dubbed this approach the “Colorado Model” and planned to expand it nationwide. Rob Stein, Democracy Alliance founder, predicted that the left would find success.

Colorado was a GOP stronghold for all elections for decades (former Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt was a Senator for one term in the 1970’s), yet now it’s gone all the way to the Democrats, who did it in just a decade with massive amounts of money funding multiple left-wing groups, all non-profits, outside the Democrat Party. In fact they basically replaced the Democrat Party machine in that state. These groups focused on many different issues, among them voter registration, changing voting laws (for mail-in ballots for one), and other policy battles – but they all came together during elections to put Democrats in power.

“It is a warning shot to conservatives in America that if the Colorado Model is replicated elsewhere, conservatives have nothing comparable to possibly compete with it, and they had better watch out,” he said, as quoted in The Blueprint: How the Democrats Won Colorado.
…
“Republicans in Colorado continued to put their money on racehorses, while the left just bought the racetrack.”

By the time Lara Trump and Michael Whatley took over the RNC it was clear that they had learned the lessons, all of them, and one aspect was to change the traditional GOTV methods by using ballot harvesting, even as the GOP tried to lock it down. If you couldn’t beat them – and the GOP knew it could not stymie ballot-harvesting everywhere – then you had to join them. But they also copied something else from the Democrats, ballot chasing:

Ballot chasing is distinct from “ballot harvesting,” which is allowed in some states and entails actually turning in ballots on behalf of other people. It’s also not “ballot curing” (an after-election practice of tracking down challenged ballots and getting your voters to fix errors), which is most confused with “ballot chasing” as we know it today.

Ballot chasing is a data-driven operation that requires knowledge of who the permanent mail-in voters, independents, and low-propensity voters are and how to contact them. 

It’s not cheap – much of Zuckerberg’s $400 million was spent on it in 2020 – and as that article shows there was some resistance within the GOP (“There’s not even enough doors” to knock on). Just as with the Democrat party in Colorado a non-profit outfit called Turning Point Action operated as a de-facto GOP for months in the battleground states before finally being supported by the party. As just one example of the brain-dead operation that existed before Lara Trump, the conservative activist Scott Presler, who worked miracles in Pennsylvania doing voter registration, tweeted the useless McDaniel for nearly 300 days with no response.

The same frustration with Romney and the RNC led other right-wing groups in other battleground states to start building components of GOTV machines by themselves, in the hope that RNC would eventually turn up with support and these efforts had to be year-round:

  • In Michigan the Underserved Voter Outreach Team (UVOTE) went after segments of the voting population that the left wanted little to do with and which had never been approached by the GOP. They include people of faith, gun owners, veterans, and others — constitutional patriots, a significant portion of whom have for various reasons sat out elections.
  • In Arizona an outfit called the Arizona Liberty Network focused on things that were pissing off Hispanics: crime, schools for their kids, the economy culture and even immigration! All while the Democrats did their usual playbook of screaming about GOP racism.

As this writer put it, the focus of the GOTV efforts every where had to be:

  • Absentee ballot (AB) universes, particularly among mid-to-low-propensity voters who identify as Republicans or lean to the right
  • The partisan distribution of registered voters.

Anyone on the right not focusing their field or digital efforts on those two numbers is wasting donor money and committing political malpractice. 

It sounds very simple, and it is. By June 2024 the GOP was winning the “arms race” in registered voters. Even so, the writer warned:

Consider this: in 2020, 11,600 noncitizens received federal ballots and voted in Arizona, a number that exceeded Biden’s margin of victory in the state. Now consider that at least ten million new illegals have been let loose in this country since the 2020 elections. Since I suspect there are people that don’t know what time it is, let me again use my 2×4: people conducting show trials against political opposition, who have been actively importing illegals into the country over the last four years, are absolutely, 100% going to strategically slip tens of thousands of those non-citizens into the electoral process.

Still, these efforts were starting to make an impact. By April the changes across all three areas were such that a Democrat suckhole MSM source, Vanity Fair, was worried about Trump’s ‘Terrifyingly Competent’ Campaign:

The big story in 2016 and to some extent 2020, was that his campaign was a soap opera. It was clashing personalities, it was nonstop drama. This cycle, the thing I’ve been struck by time and again, is that it is a low-drama campaign. Operatives don’t want press, don’t want their egos out there. They’re focused on getting Trump to the White House in November 2024….They’ve weeded out the backstabbers
…
“I think the mechanics, the underlying ground game, you know, the getting the state parties in line, getting the Republican national committee in line is really, I think, what is fueling this success he’s had on the campaign trail. Now, apparently, he’s got the money behind him, as well.”

It was music to my ears, and in the end it proved to be enough.

But will it be in the future?

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How The GOP Beat The Cheat in 2024, Part 1
How The GOP Beat The Cheat in 2024, Part 2: Lawfare
How The GOP Beat The Cheat in 2024, Part 3: Voter Integrity

Your Cheatin’ Ballot I: Illegal Aliens
Your Cheatin’ Ballot II: Pennsylvania
Your Cheatin’ Ballot III: Pennsylvania Right Now
Your Cheatin’ Ballot IV: Democrat Party History