Ballot chasing has long propped up weak Democrat candidates, but Republicans have adopted and perfected the strategy in 2024 and its paying immediate dividends for former President Donald Trump, Turning Point Action’s Tyler Bowyer told Breitbart News Saturday host Matt Boyle.
Bowyer, the former Arizona Republican National Committeeman who’s leading the Turning Point Action ballot chasing operations, said the biggest difference between the 2020 and 2024 elections is Republicans’ laser focus in 2024 on turning out low propensity voters who may not have cast a ballot in 2016 or 2020 – an area where Democrats have far outworked Republicans in the past.
“Actually, right now we’re outpacing the Democrats,” Bowyer told Boyle. “It looks like – the data comes back today – possibly as great as five to one in the low propensity voters in Arizona. And so we’re feeling really good about where things are.”
Bowyer explained Turning Point Action’s “Moneyball” strategy, adopting and perfecting a playbook long used by Democrats to “chase votes” through a coordinated effort.
“We have put hundreds and thousands of volunteers out into the field… employing these very same tactics, which are, identify the low propensity voters, get them in first, get them in early, so that we make sure we get their votes,” he said.
Ballot harvesting is illegal in Arizona, but its long history of embracing early voting by mail has positioned it as ground zero for chasing votes – and uniquely situates the state for Republicans to make gains by employing the strategy. He previously told Breitbart News the goal is to get to more than 150,000 extra Republican votes in Arizona alone – about five percent more than 2020 when Trump secured 1,661,686 votes.
“Some states, like Nevada and Michigan, and obviously we know California and other places, they can just harvest votes relentlessly,” he said. “Most states, it’s illegal, so they have to do what we call chasing votes… The numbers are there between registration and location and the different tactics that they can take in order to effectively chase those votes, then they pounce on it. And so that’s why Arizona has become a target.”
He continued, “it becomes possible for you to do this Moneyball equation, which is identify how many bodies its going to take us statistically, what is the likelihood that you can chase that many votes? We’ve employed basically the same playbook.”
Bowyer broke down the numbers in Arizona, detailing the universe of people that fit into the low propensity universe Turning Point Action has identified.
“You’ve got three and a half million people who will vote in the election (in Arizona), somewhere in that ballpark,” he said. “So the way that you look at this is you go, okay, what does 1%, what does 10% look like, in that ballpark? … Ten percent of three and a half million, you think you’re going to land somewhere between [300,000] and 350,000 voters – which is ironically where we stand about right now with how many people cast votes in Arizona. And your goal has to be, how do you move the needle with the remaining people who don’t vote?”
Bowyer added, “in most in most elections, you’ll have somewhere between 60 to 70% hard voters in any state. The Left has really aggressively gone after an additional 10% and that’s how they’ve chased those votes. They’ve identified, okay, who are the best 10% of people who don’t vote, and what are the reasons they don’t vote? Well, some people just may not believe the system. They think their vote doesn’t matter or count. They get busy, they get sick, they’re old, they’re on their deathbed, they’re in the hospital, they’re traveling.”
There’s another reason not immediately apparent that voters stay home – a universe of voters difficult to identify proactively. “About a fourth of people on any given day are having a kind of a bad day,” Bowyer said. “And so you have to imagine, you have anywhere between 15 and 25% of people that wake up on Election Day just having a bad day, and therefore they don’t vote.”
Although difficult, Turning Point Action has a playbook for reaching those voters in states like Arizona.
“So when you create a concierge type of a system to be able to chase those ballots down, that enables you to add an extra percentage, 2, 3, 4, 5 percent to make up for whatever frailties your campaign has,” he said.
Ballot chasing swings both ways, he warned. The strategy’s effectiveness in compensating for weak candidates can boost Democrats’ numbers in 2024 as it did in 2020.
“Obviously, Joe Biden wasn’t the best campaigner on planet Earth,” Bowyer said. “They hid him. They had the same plan for Kamala. They’ve had to force her out now, because it’s not working. But how they make up for those votes and people that they scare away is they chase down the low propensity, highly likely to be with them votes. And so what we’ve done is effectively the same thing.”
Bowyer dove further into the hard numbers in Arizona to demonstrate how significant ballot chasing operations can help Trump.
“Basically every 35,000 votes is an extra percent that you can add,” he said. Using 30,000 voters for mathematical simplicity’s sake, Bowyer said “if you chase basically 150,000 votes, that’s an extra 5% that you’re adding to your vote totals. If Trump is polling ahead – let’s just say two or 3% according to polls – and you chase an extra 5%, the logic is, is that you’re probably not going to get every single one of those votes, but you’re going to land somewhere between five and 8% probably victoriously.
He said Democrats know these numbers too. “So when they look at polls and they see, oh, Kamala is down 2 percent, well, that’s overcomable. So, for example, in Wisconsin right now, that’s overcomable. If you know your entire group can chase [60,000] to 70,000 extra votes, that’s where the Moneyball equation comes in. You have to go, okay, have we isolated who those voters are? Can we get them out? And if we do, is the outcome going to be what we want it to be? And we think we’re on that track.”
Bowyer said Turning Point Action’s ballot chasing success this far has him optimistic for the election’s outcome.
In Arizona, he said “we’re outpacing, as of yesterday, the Democrats about four to one in low propensity votes that have been turned in. Most of those people are never voted or have neglected to vote in the past. That is unheard of, that is that is not happening in any other state in the country.”
He said in 2020 “when we were about 19 or 20 days out, the Republicans were about 20 percent down in early turn in compared to Democrats in early vote. As of today we are 10 percent, yesterday we were 12 percent ahead of where the Democrats are. We’re well over a pretty close to 30-point swing in percentage of turnout from 2020.”
Bowyer calls those numbers “disastrous” for Democrats, telling Boyle that “the most unreported, untold story so far in this election is that Democrats are more than double-digits down in almost every state. But in Arizona, they’re closer to 25-30 points down from where they were in 2020. That is a huge swing.”
He encouraged listeners interesting in getting involved with Turning Point Action’s efforts to visit tpaction.com, where they can learn more about volunteering or donating.
“Our Commit 100 program is putting volunteers and some paid people out to chase 100 ballots in Arizona, Wisconsin and other states,” Bowyer said. Opportunities exist to get involved remotely and on the ground, and Bowyer said Turning Point Action will even put volunteers up in hotel rooms.
“It’s working. Be part of it. This is the last opportunity, the last stand for America, and we need your help in Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia and other places,” he said.
Breitbart News Saturday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern.
Bradley Jaye is a Capitol Hill Correspondent for Breitbart News. Follow him on X/Twitter at @BradleyAJaye.