June 11, 2023
Dear editor;
To wrap up the week, please check out my colleagues’ new pieces on Voter ID (Noel Wilkins) and the main subject of this post, mail-in voting (John Pudner’s latest piece in NewsMax, which has overtaken CNN in viewership many time slots). In May 2020, Pudner sounded the alarm in this Breitbart Radio interview that, if efforts continued to discourage Republicans from mail-in voting, that then-president Donald Trump would not win critical battleground states such as Pennsylvania.
Unfortunately, some campaigns today are run as though it were the 1990s when only eight percent of votes were by mail. Times certainly have changed since then, where Democrats build huge 76% to 23% mail-in voting leads in critical states such as Pennsylvania, a margin too large to make up on election day. In fact, Democrats won the mail-in vote in 14 of 15 states that were tracked during the 2020 presidential election.
Studying these results and learning from the lessons found within, I took leave from Take Back Our Republic Action to run the Republican mayoral campaign in Shreveport, La., whereby simply focusing on serious mail-in voting efforts allowed us to become one of a rare few Republican campaigns to actually win the early vote, and in turn, later electing the first Republican mayor in Shreveport this century.
It was through this campaign as analyzing election results from both 2020 and 2022 that both I and Pudner came to the same conclusion, conservatives must adapt and begin mail-in voting operations.
Thankfully, as noted in Pudner’s NewsMax piece, we are no longer alone in insisting this be the case. Former gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake recently launched the largest ballot-chasing operation in her state’s history, announcing that not doing so would mean Republicans would continue to “play checkers” while Democrats “played chess”.
A few days later, Turning Point, alongside Scott Presler, announced a similar effort. Former president Trump has begun to urge conservatives to create and effectively execute mail-in balloting operations going forward.
Just as we predicted four years ago, conservatives have lost many races in part because of their refusal to chase mail-in ballots, and for the last two years, we have sounded the alarm bell that conservatives will lose many races because of spoiler candidates unless Final Five is enacted that states any candidate win only if they get an actual majority of the votes. As we continue to advocate for these reforms, we hope it does not take as long to find conservative allies on Final Five as it did on chasing mail-in ballots.
Byron Shehee, National Grassroots director, Take Back Our Republic Action
Submitted by: John Pudner, Shorewood, Wis.