Exclusive — Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Ralph Reed: Galvanizing Evangelical, Catholic Swing-State Voters Could Deliver Trump Victory

Supporters wait for former President Donald Trump to depart the Wilkie D. Ferguson Jr. U.S
AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

The Faith & Freedom Coalition has been working to galvanize low propensity Evangelical and Catholic voters for former President Donald Trump, in what founder and chairman Ralph Reed is calling “the best ground game” he has ever seen.

“We’re hitting ten million doors, just Faith & Freedom [Coalition]. That’s half of all the doors that were knocked on by the entire Republican Party four years ago,” Reed said during an interview on Breitbart News Saturday. “That doesn’t count what Trump does. It doesn’t count Turning Point or SBA [Pro-Life America]. It doesn’t count what Elon Musk is doing through his PAC.”

“I can tell you right now, this is the best ground game that I have ever seen…I’m not talking about robocalls and computer-generated text messages. I’m talking about people at the door or phone calls from volunteers,” he added. “This is more than we have ever delivered as a movement.”

In the interview with Breitbart D.C. Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle, Reed specifically broke down the numbers he is seeing from voters of faith in swing states, what percentage supports Trump, and how boosting voter turnout by a few percentage points could potentially gain Trump thousands of more votes to secure his victory in November. 

“We are focused primarily on low propensity self-identified evangelical voters, modeled pro-life, social conservatives who have voted in one or fewer of the last three elections,” he said. 

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From the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s estimation, between 25 percent and 27 percent of electorate are self-identified Evangelical conservative Christians, while devout, mass-attending Catholic comprise another 10 percent to 11 percent, Reed said.

“So you’re talking about 37 percent to 38 percent of the electorate. It’s bigger than the Hispanic vote, the African American vote, and the union vote combined,” he said.

Today, as you and I talk, Donald Trump is already winning 82 percent of that Evangelical vote. I think he’s on his way…to matching his 2020 margin, which was 84 percent, and I think there’s a chance he could go higher,” he continued. 

Then you turn to the Roman Catholic vote, which is going to be so critical, particularly in the upper Midwest states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan. He’s already winning the Catholic vote today, 52 to 47 percent,” he said, citing Pew Research data which he noted was taken before Vice President Kamala Harris became the first nominee for president since the 1980s to decline attending the Al Smith Dinner.  

The organization’s after-action analysis in 2022 and 2024 primaries astoundingly revealed that if these low-propensity voters of faith are visited with at least two door-knocks, backed with vote checks and phone calls, the turnout among them can increase between 5 and 11 percent, Reed said.

“No poll is going to pick that up when those people come and they come in bigger numbers than they did in 2020 or in 2016,” he said. “It’s going to be a big surprise to a lot of people, including all of these media pollsters.”

Boyle pointed out that increasing voter turnout by those percentages in swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Wisconsin, could mean “possibly tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands” more votes for Trump than in previous elections. 

“It’s definitely a game changer,” Reed replied:

So let’s just take an example. Let’s take the state of Georgia where we have 1.9 million modeled social conservative voters, and 535,000 of them are low propensity voters. Now look, we can’t deliver a door knock to every one of them because some of them are in rural areas where it’s just not efficient. So let’s say we get 400,000 of them where we deliver two door knocks and we bump that turn out — let’s be conservative and say 5 percent.  That’s 20,000 votes. If it goes up 10 percent, it’s 40,000 votes that [other pollsters] are not counting because they’re modeling these polls based on 2020 turnouts.”

“I’m telling you, these people are coming and they’re coming in bigger numbers. I think the margin in the Catholic vote, which is gonna be critical in a state like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, or Michigan, I think his margin is going to be bigger than it was against Hillary Clinton,” he said. 

Reed opined that while Democrats “had to dump Biden,” Catholics who “held their nose and voted for Joe Biden because he was one of them” are “not going to do that for Kamala Harris.” 

“I think we’re also getting a pull, and that is the pull of these voters who are expressing, as all voters are by a margin of three to one, that they’re unhappy with the direction of the country — that they don’t like Biden’s policy,” he said. “[Harris] cannot disentangle herself from those policies and their deleterious effects on the American people, whether it’s the economy, inflation, all of this runaway spending, an open border with a humanitarian and national security and crime crisis, and wars on virtually every continent on the globe.” 

Reed said he believes left-leaning media and Democrats are downplaying conservative ground game ahead of the election to distract from their long list of policy failures. 

“I think they’re up to their usual shenanigans — the same reason why they spent two weeks talking about childless cat ladies and three weeks talking about Haitian immigrants in Springfield,” he said.

“I mean, let’s be honest, [the media are] joined at the hip with the Democratic Party and the left at this point. And it’s the same reason why Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and all these Democratic Senate candidates only want to talk about two things: Project 2025 and abortion. Because they don’t want to talk about the issues that voters care about, which is the economy, inflation, crime, and the border.”

“Those issues are losers for them,” he added. “They’re trying to change the subject. I just don’t think it’s going to work.”

Breitbart News Saturday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern.

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