As we come down the homestretch of Election Season 2024 and look at the impressive absentee ballot and early voting numbers for Republicans and Republican-leaning independents in battleground states, it’s worth taking a look back at how we got here on the eve of Election Day.
Let’s go back to the depression of the midterms in 2022. There was no real red wave. We eked out a slim majority in the House, but overall, the results were well short of expectations. After I picked myself up off the floor, literally, and started sifting through the rubble, it became very apparent that outside of Florida, there was no real absentee ballot chase, no early vote push, especially with mid-to-low prop voters in key states like Arizona. A basic rule of thumb for a successful AB chase is an 80% return of that universe, yet in Arizona, it was 65% in 2022. I immediately began talking about this problem for the right with Matthew Boyle of Breitbart and my good friends Buck Sexton and Jesse Kelly, and also wrote about it on November 21, 2022, at American Greatness.
I believe that action is the soul of restoration—not talk, not white papers, but actually personally, as best I can, initiating meaningful, purposeful action. I began laying plans in December of 2022 as to how we would never ever let the midterms happen again. I pitched donors the plan in January of 2023, proposing that we do two pilot programs that year as we also prioritized and emphasized a Ballot Out, Ballot In training initiative with American Majority immediately in 2023 to prepare the grassroots for the real fight in 2024.
The pilot programs in 2023 were nothing crazy; a few million dollars total between four key parishes in Louisiana (there’s a reason Jeff Landry avoided a run-off) and seven key state senate races in Virginia. Both were successful and demonstrated that this would work in 2024 in battleground states. While others talked about insane plans for something they’d never even done before, some of us quietly put the pieces in place for absentee ballot generation and chase in Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. With the help of a few trusted allies, but really with American Majority Action driving the plan, we looked at Arizona and realized that the permanent ballot universe in Arizona only had about a 15,000 or so ballot advantage for Republicans over Democrats. Starting in March through October of this year, we determined to grow that advantage as best we could with limited resources for AB generation. We were able to drive that 15,000 advantage to 80,000 while emphasizing mid-to-low props with that push because we knew that if those types of voters would request a ballot, we could get roughly 80% of them to vote. There’s a reason that in some places where we are working, low-prop Republicans are beating out their counterpart low-prop Dems by eight points.