‘The left has perfected this’: Conservatives take page from Obama’s playbook in battleground Wisconsin
Fox News
WISCONSIN— One conservative group taking Wisconsin by storm is tapping a strategy previously emphasized by former President Barack Obama in order to win the 2024 presidential election for Republicans.
“It’s narrowing down our organizing to the ward and then mobilizing,” Turning Point Action National Enterprise Director Brett Galaszewski told Fox News Digital in an interview.
The group’s ballot-chase program involves “neighbors talking with other neighbors.”
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He explained that there is more value in approaching people as their neighbor or someone they have a relationship with than as a stranger who may not be from the area.
“It’s the community organizing model that Obama talked about in 2008,” Galaszewski said. “You know, we laughed at Obama in 2008, as conservatives, when he said, ‘I’m a community organizer.'”
But that strategy, he said, is “going to make a huge difference here.”
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Obama stressed his past as a community organizer during his presidential campaign in 2008, cutting an ad in which he referred to his experience organizing after winning the Democrat nomination that summer.
As Galaszewski noted, Republicans at the time ridiculed Obama’s emphasis on his community organizing as a credential in his bid to be commander-in-chief.
Turning Point Action is running a robust ground game operation in key states, such as Wisconsin, alongside various other groups, hoping to supplement the Republican Party’s efforts. The group has the largest such operation in Wisconsin, as many expect the state to be crucial in deciding the presidential election.
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The all-hands-on-deck approach is beneficial for Republicans to make up some of the financial disparity between the former President Trump campaign and Vice President Harris’ and the Democrats’ war chest.
As Turning Point Action begins its on the ground ballot-chasing, they aren’t racing to knock as many doors as possible. Instead, they are targeting specifically identified people. The group has determined that the best way to turbocharge turnout is to focus on “disengaged and low-propensity conservatives.”
“We no longer see this as a war of persuasion among swing voters,” said Galaszewski.
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Many people don’t value their votes as much as those heavily involved in politics, he explained.
“That’s something that we know the left has really homed in on — targeting those voters with low-ballot value and making it work.”
Conservatives who may not be planning to vote are the ones Turning Point Action thinks can pave the path to a Republican win. “It’s a numbers game in Wisconsin,” he added.
The group has hundreds of ballot-chasers working statewide in Wisconsin to turn out these potential voters. Some of them are salaried employees, whose full-time job is “to chase ballots in these territories.”