Please read this email like you read the Wall Street Journal. The first part of this email is like the WSJ front page, with a few words on each topic covered in more depth further down. Please read the paragraphs below to pick which in-depth updates to read - because this email is long due to covering a 20-day, 5-state blitz. As we travel throughout the country, our prayers are for Israel 6,000 miles away.
PA October 15 - Door-knocking to save the battlefield then a 30th-anniversary screening of Copperhead movie with star actors and our friend Ron Maxwell, the producer of movies Gods & Generals and Gettysburg (info and tickets here).
WI October 14 - Speeches by TBOR Action President as well as WI GOP Chair Brian Schimming and Congressman Derrick Van Orden at the Grant County GOP (details here)
WI October 13 - Keynote speech at the Ozaukee Oktoberfest (media coverage here).
GA October 6 - Largest conservative Gala in the state run by a former employee (Cole Muzio). Photos from conversations with All-American swimmer Riley Gaines (photo above of lighthearted exchange of when my daughter Susanna was still faster than her), former US Senator Kelly Loeffler and the State Rep who passed our bill to allow instant runoffs for overseas military personnel. (event details here). Full Story Below - GA Gala with former Sen. Loeffler, Majority Leader and Biggest Pro-life Org
VA October 1-5 - Annual Thomas More event run by former classmate and alum of the high school that produced Steve Bannon and me. We also knocked on doors to alert voters in three counties of attempts to overrun them with mega developments from international corporations - resulting in strange threats our employee received. Please read this great post by TBOR Action Communications Director Noel Wilkins of the group he runs there in Orange County - the kind of local group we are proud to support when they are threatened by out-of-state international corporations. Full Story Below - VA - Massive VA Door-to-Door vs. International Corporations
CA September 28-30 - Meetings in Los Angeles with the top volunteer leaders in Wisconsin, Rich and Lena Eng, regular attendees at the Waukesha GOP. Also, our former Development Director Tori Sorg who now runs development efforts for Open Secrets (which provided the data for us to document that Planned Parenthood was the biggest violator of campaign finance laws). Talk about killing two birds with one stone, this trip included Democratic Presidential candidate turned Forward Party founder Andrew Yang speaking at the American Democracy Summit while just one hour away in Anaheim speeches were delivered by Donald Trump (click for speech) and Ron DeSantis (click for intro by our friend and CA GOP Chair Jessica Patterson and DeSantis speech here) the California GOP Convention. Full Story Below - Midwest Conservatives in CA as Liberals, Trump and Desantis Speak
WI September 27 - Training from a half dozen experts, highlighted by the video clip shown below of Matt Braynard, who strikes a perfect balance on election integrity that illustrates why we urge conservatives to call out election rules that were rigged without using the word “steal,” which is really a fundraising ploy. Matt documents actual illegal voting that took place, but documents in-depth research that resulted in proving that other allegations such as “ghost voters” in Georgia did NOT happen.Full Story Below - Election Integrity Champion Highlights 1st Training in WI
Here are photos from all of the events listed that have already happened, with a little more detail.
GA - Gala with former Sen. Loeffler, Majority Leader and Biggest Pro-life Org
Georgia - (Left photo) I must admit when I talked to former US Senator Kelly Loeffler and her staff at the Georgia event, I focused mainly on her background of owning a WNBA team. More than half a million unique visitors have viewed my sports stats including this game I invented of the all-time great women’s basketball teams. However, our other topic was more important. Sometimes candidates who do not win an election actually make even bigger changes while not being tied down to an elected office. Kelly dove into building huge door-to-door organizations in Georgia which might offset some of the work on the left by Stacey Abrams after she lost her race to Brian Kemp (though not conceding) and started registering and turning out voters.
(Top right photo) Chuck Efstration is now the Georgia Majority Leader, and I was his first political consultant years ago and told people at the time he was the smartest candidate I had ever helped. We lived just a few miles outside his district, and I still remember passing out his materials to everyone entering Collins Hill football games (something Noel Wilkins is doing now for Orange County football games, see below).
While there is no disputing that most conservatives hate most Ranked Choice Voting systems, I do stress that there are specific good types of voting that use an instant runoff ballot that do involve voters “ranking” candidates at some point. I hope we don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. These good systems include; 1, Georgia State Legislature bill that helped many serving the country overseas get their vote counted; 2, the Final Five-like system in Virginia that led to Governor Glenn Youngkin being elected after President Trump lost the state by double digits; and a Final Five bill introduced in Wisconsin that we have found has plurality support among more than 1,100 conservative Republican primary voters by a close but significant 45% to 32% with the rest undecided. As conservatives, keep an open mind!
VA - Massive VA Door-to-Door vs. International Corporations
Virginia - Please read Noel Wilkins great piece on a group he runs in Orange County that we wholeheartedly support. It was great to pull together seven team members to knock on doors in three Virginia counties to work to stop international corporations from plowing over local residents with mega-developments that would erase history - but Orange is special because Noel lives there.
Midwest Conservatives in CA as Liberals, Trump and DeSantis Speak
California - It felt funny to fly all the way to California to see some of my favorite people, since we all live in the Midwest. It was also quite a contrast to talk with people at the American Democracy Summit, where we were in a tiny minority as Democrats won an online Presidential poll of attendees 92 percent to 8 percent in Los Angeles, to Anaheim and hour away with our friend and the great California GOP Chair Jessica Patterson (who had the most GOP pickups of any state party in 2022) introduced both Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump.
Rich and Lena Eng (top photo) are regulars at Waukesha GOP meetings and share with me the thought that Final Five would stop so much party infighting and prevent Democrats from spending big in Republican primaries to get rid of candidates that can beat them before the general election.
Tori Sorg (bottom photo) is an incredible Development Director who has pulled in checks for foundations with a lot of zeros behind them. When we had to separate our 501c3 from our 501c4, Tori went back to foundation work but later moved back into the arena to run development for Open Secrets. While Open Secrets is not a conservative organization, it really is one of the few groups that shoots down the middle in their research, and in fact produced the study that I used to point out in Breitbart that the biggest violator of 501c4 election laws was Planned Parenthood.
Wisconsin training - Finally all half dozen presenters agree Matt Braynard stole the show in our first training for potential candidates and campaign workers. As a true election integrity champion who was hired to check for illegal voting. This video makes clear the distinction between research that truly identifies and addresses illegal voting and which election rules were RIGGED, while at the same time reaching honest conclusions when research shows that a particular “stop the STEAL theory” simply was not true.
The difference between pointing out when rules are RIGGED, and stating someone is among the 29 percent who believe the election was STOLEN is a key distinction. Note that the recent Washington Post poll showed 51 percent planning to vote for Trump if he faces Biden again, even though only 29 percent believe the election was stolen. That means every time someone uses the words “stop the steal” as part of a fundraising effort for themselves, they turn the focus of that extra 22 percent away from Joe Biden and the impact of liberal policies to an issue on which they do not agree with the 29 percent.
Some examples of cases that proved to be true, and one that did not from Matt’s presentation:
Matt noted the thousands of voters that cast votes as “indefinitely confined” - which means you need an ambulance to leave your house - even though they were perfectly capable of voting in person. They even found a photo in Wisconsin of an official’s wife ON JET SKIS while claiming she could only vote from home as an indefinitely confined person. Another example was the thousands of votes cast by people who had legally moved to other states. Finally, there were people who claimed a PO Box as an address yet were allowed to vote. As Matt noted, even if you are homeless you can claim a park bench or underpass as your home if that is where you sleep, and the attendees laughed at the end of this clip by noting that no matter how small you are you cannot fit in a PO Box to sleep.
On the flip side, Matt’s Look Ahead America (of which I am a Board Member) also researched what looked like cheating - thousands and thousands of “ghost voters” in Georgia, which means suspicious votes cast by voters registered to vote who had not voted in years and suddenly voted for Biden in 2020. Matt had researchers go door to door to these voters just to see if there was anyone there who really voted. The researchers just asked how their voting experience was (so as to not intimidate anyone real from voting).
To everyone’s surprise, these ghost voters were real. When they came to a door they all documented the same background - Stacey Abrams' huge voter registration operation had come to their doors, noted they had not voted in years, asked them to come up with a plan for when they would vote, and followed up until they cast their ballot. That is a legit turnout operation. Matt’s point as the data guy who does not back down from tracking down potential fraud to the point that he toured the US with Rudy Guilliani during the election challenge is simple:
If liberals spend hours going to doors of liberal voters who have missed elections and follow through until their ballot is cast, and conservatives spend those same hours sitting across the street from a drop box (luckily there are far fewer of them now in Wisconsin) - then liberals will once again win the turnout war in 2024.
Conservatives need more people to sign up to be election observers to follow the chain of custody and make sure rules are being followed. BUT last year across the country many conservatives clicked to donate to stop the steal campaigns and spent days sitting across from drop boxes while liberals were going through neighborhoods convincing other liberals to vote. From my perspective, this all boils down to each active conservative this really boils down to one question to ask yourself, “Would you rather start turning out fellow conservatives to vote, or would you rather complain about losing and discourage conservatives from voting by telling them their vote will be switched anyway so not to even bother showing up?”