Former President Donald Trump and other Republicans in battleground states, particularly Arizona, have an edge in 2024 that they never had before: Ballot chasers on the right, led by conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point Action, working hard to statistically undermine Democrats’ chances of repeating the 2020 shocker that took Trump out and installed Democrat President Joe Biden in the White House.
Tyler Bowyer, the former Arizona Republican National Committeeman who’s leading the Turning Point Action ballot chasing operations, compared the never-before-seen-on-the-American-right effort to the Moneyball story of how in 2002 the Oakland Athletics Major League Baseball team ditched the conventional wisdom of traditional scouts, entirely replacing them with statistical analysts who emphasized on-base percentage. The effort shocked professional sports and saw the A’s go on a historic winning streak in the summer of 2002 and make a playoff run nobody thought possible on a small budget that paled in comparison to bigger market teams like the New York Yankees or Boston Red Sox. While the A’s didn’t end up winning the World Series that year, the Red Sox, led by owner John Henry, employed the same strategy the next two years, and then in 2004 saw the storied franchise reverse an 86-year drought of national championships known to many in Beantown as “the Curse of the Great Bambino.” After winning the 2004 World Series, the Red Sox would win several more over the next two decades despite a lingering drought they’re currently in. The Moneyball story of “sabermetrics,” using statistics to bolster a professional sports team’s chances of victory, was first told in a 2003 book by Michael Lewis and late memorialized in a 2011 film starring Brad Pitt as A’s general manager Billy Beane and Jonah Hill as his statistics-obsessed assistant.
A big part of the story in the movie on this front is how catcher-turned-first baseman Scott Hatteberg, played by actor Chris Pratt, has a high on-base percentage but, as portrayed in the movie, was a terrible defensive first baseman. The stats guys in Beane’s front office needs to convince head coach Art Howe, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, to actually put Hatteberg in the lineup—to which he eventually very reluctantly agrees. Across the board, the movie shows that when the coach finally agrees to these various changes from the general manager’s office, the team starts netting some major victories including a massive winning streak in the summer. But towards the end of the winning streak, as the team blew a massive lead late in a game, Hatteberg comes up to the plate and hits a walk-off home run to secure the record-breaking (at the time) 20th consecutive win. So, the moral of the story is, statistics can get you into a better spot, but you still have to execute to win ball games.
Bowyer, in a lengthy interview late this summer with Breitbart News, laid out how he and the Turning Point crew are applying that same Moneyball mentality to winning elections for Republicans, and defeating Democrats.
“The important part about Moneyball, in addition to it being a statistical analysis, is that you still have to do it,” Bowyer said. “The coolest part of the Moneyball story is you’re basing who you put out on statistics as opposed to just sticking them out there, but you’ve got to still do that work right? It’s not, ‘oh what if this many Republicans show up based off the polls and their feelings?’ No, it’s truly like Moneyball where it’s you actually have the people in the field doing the work. That is the key part of this where you have to chase. You have to have the bodies to actually do it, otherwise you’re screwed. That’s the basic piece of how Republicans have gone into almost every modern election. The general push since basically Bush was in office where they had a chase program, probably the last one that was adequately used was the last Bush election, you now just have Republicans who have just said they’re going to get on the right side of polling and just pump money into Karl Rove, which means independents would be on our side and that’s how you win. Well, that doesn’t work anymore, because Democrats figured out they can just replace all those votes with low-propensity voters hanging out in their parents’ basement who are moody or having a bad day that day, because all they have to do is chase them. By the way if they expand early voting, which they did in 2020, it makes it even easier.”
So, how is Bowyer accomplishing this feat? Well, first off, he explained, the focus begins primarily with locking down his state of Arizona for the right. Arizona and Georgia, two states whose electoral votes total 27 combined, both slipped away from Trump in the days after the election in 2020. If both move back into the Trump column, and Trump holds North Carolina—which he won in both 2016 and 2020—then Trump is simply one state away from the presidency no matter what the final state is between Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Wisconsin. Without Arizona, Trump would need Pennsylvania to be the state that puts him over the top, along with North Carolina and Georgia. So Arizona plays a critical role here in relaxing Trump’s needs in the upper rust belt, and makes it that much easier for the former president to wipe out the current Vice President on Nov. 5.
“Our big focus, our primary focus, has always been Arizona first and that’s just from the statistical focus we talked about from your first piece, which is that Arizona statistically makes the most sense,” Bowyer said. “Arizona is kind of like for us what Michigan is for the Democrats. If they lose Michigan, it makes it really tough for them to win the presidency. It’s still possible, but it takes a huge amount of statistical breaks to win. Arizona is the same for us. If we lose Arizona, it takes a huge amount of statistical options off the table. I’ve never analyzed the left’s statistical options, but I would assume that Michigan is way, way up there just knowing the map. So, for us it’s been Arizona and going down the list of what matters the most and what things are looking like and feeling. Wisconsin matters too, and that’s where we’ve put our second biggest muscle piece in Wisconsin. We have a full-time operating office out of Waukesha – it’s right on the border of Waukesha and Milwaukee. I’m there literally every three days for ballot chasing training. We’re doing literally the exact same program that we’re doing in Arizona. Wisconsin is a little bit more tricky because Arizona in Phoenix everyone lives on top of each other but in Wisconsin it’s a lot more spread out. It’s a lot like the rest of the Midwest, a little bit more rural and more suburban rural, so you have to have a significant amount of people able to make contact with people in different ways. Wisconsin is going really well. We have a team of about five times as many people on the ground as they had in 2020 right now, and we’re going to continue to up that and continue chasing votes.”
That first piece to which Bowyer is referring is an article Breitbart News published way back in January of 2024 from Las Vegas, Nevada, where Turning Point Action brought together party activists and election officials from key battleground states to chart out the ballot chasing strategy for the right nationwide but particularly in battleground states. As Breitbart News reported at the time, Turning Point Action identified millions of potential perhaps likely Republican voters who did not vote in the last several elections for whatever reason. Maybe they were not registered, or maybe they were not politically engaged to the point of caring enough to vote. In the key battleground states, like Arizona, these numbers are significantly higher than the margins that separated Trump from Biden in the 2020 election results. In Arizona specifically, it’s 27 times the margin. In Georgia, it was 45 times the margin. In Wisconsin, it was 26 times the 2020 margin. And so on and so forth across the battlegrounds.
In 2020, there were 3,333,829 votes cast in Arizona. Trump got 1,661,686 of them. Biden got 1,672,143 of them. Biden’s margin over Trump was a mere 10,457 votes. When you’re talking about more than three million votes cast, slightly over ten thousand is basically a statistical rounding error. It’s such a minor difference, that any slight smidge of a bit of an edge one way or the other going into the rematch—which this election originally was set to be and kind of still is—could blow it wide open. So Bowyer and company began studying the data in Arizona in the aftermath of 2020 and trying to look for that edge. They found it, they think, in what they call low propensity voters. If they can juice things for the right a few thousand here, a few thousand there, they could give Trump a statistical advantage nobody sees coming that looks like five or more percent extra for him in the final vote totals as compared with last time. And that could be ballgame. Lights out. It’s over. Pack it up. Go home, Kamala—at least in Arizona.
“Our model is that somewhere in the ballpark of 3.1 million votes will be cast in Arizona,” Bowyer said. “So, basically you need 1.551 million to win. So that’s the model you’re running off of. To give you an idea, 10 percent of your side’s vote is 150,000 votes. Five percent of the total votes is 150,000 votes. So, from a modeling standpoint, it’s like well what can we do if you believe that all of the tricks they pull and there’s a lot from the election integrity community that believe we’re somewhere in the ballpark of seven percent from a manipulation factor and that includes ballot chasing on the other side, you are going to be in really good shape if you can add an additional five percent to the top line for yourself. So, for us, we’re looking at that. To make it pretty transparently clear, they have the model. We have the model. If we add an extra 150,000 votes, that makes it really tough for the Democrats to win. If we add more than that, it makes it almost assuredly impossible for the Democrats to win. They know that. It’s Moneyball. There’s only so many votes they can manipulate. So that’s our side. If you try to turn out an extra 150,000 to 200,000 people, you better have quality relationships. From a reporting standpoint, I’m really pleased we’ve made contact with and had input with close to 200,000 of those people in Arizona. And we’re right now in the ballpark of 100,000 of those relationships that have been developed with low propensity voters who didn’t vote in 2016 or 2020.”
To get to that magic 150,000 vote boost for Republicans, Bowyer said he and his team have identified a universe of a little more than 350,000 targets—with a goal of turning out at least 50 percent of them, or half. Every vote they get over that amount makes it harder and harder, Bowyer said, for the Democrats to claw back into contention—like building a massive lead at the beginning of a baseball game. Sure, it’s not over until it’s over, but it’s just statistically a lot, lot, lot harder to come back when you’re down 10 runs than it is when you’re down by just a run or two.
“Our universe that we’re targeting is over 350,000 people with a goal to turn out at least 50 percent of those people,” Bowyer said. “It’s going to be bodies on the ground to turn out 50 percent. That’s basically the methodology that the Democrats use in Michigan and other states where they’ve done this work for a long time. Just in Arizona, we’ve got—and these are Republicans, not people the Democrats can chase but registered Republicans—ballpark around 350,000 people. If you turn out 50 percent of those people, you’re over 150,000 people, which is that five percent. Every vote you get over that five percent number the Democrats know their door is slamming shut because they know they have no more votes to grab.”
So, who are the people in this universe of this 350,000 or so possible Republican voters that Bowyer and company are trying to turn out at least half of?
“One is disengaged voters, or people who are registered but just didn’t vote the last couple presidential elections,” Bowyer told Breitbart News. “Two are new voters, or people who have never voted before in presidential elections. Three are what we call inactive voters where their voter registration has fallen off.”
And how are the Turning Point folks getting to them? Well, Bowyer says they have an army of professional “ballot chasers” full-time employed—as well supplemented by some volunteers—making multiple strategic contacts to each of these 350,000 people.
“It’s hundreds,” Bowyer told Breitbart News when asked how many ballot chasers Turning Point Action has on the ground in Arizona getting these votes in. “I’ll tell you this. We have hundreds and hundreds of people. We believe we’ll have over 20 times the amount of full-time people who were in the field for Trump in 2020.”
Bowyer sat for this interview with Breitbart News on the last day of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) before Vice President Kamala Harris gave her big acceptance speech, so it came after Arizona’s primary and before early voting began in Arizona—which it has since begun—and before the end of voter registration in the state. Ballot chasers, he explained, are methodically nonstop contacting people every single day to make sure these ballots get turned in between now and election day.
“The ballot chasers pop their head off the pillow and they start their day planning the top 10 targets of who they should reach out to,” Bowyer said… “So, they attack every single day. They make a plan to reach out to at least 10 every single day to have a really fortuitous relationship building conversation with one of those three types of people and they’re doing it with 10 a day. That’s the job. That sounds basic and you might be like 10 people, that’s it? Yep, that’s exactly it because what we’re doing is we’re creating marathon training for ballot chasing when early voting begins in Arizona, which is on October 7. So, they’re doing two things at the same time. One is they’re building relationships, and they’re doing it in a healthy way. We know information about the voters, and they’re going and having conversations with them about real life stuff – not that they need to make a commitment on Trump or anything, but like they talk about the importance of voting and the election.”
The Arizona primary in early August, the first test-run of this ballot chasing operation, saw great success, per Bowyer.
“We’re obsessively focused on precinct by precinct turnout that’s happening in Phoenix,” Bowyer said. “In Maricopa County, as a whole from 2020, turnout was down for both major parties but significantly down for Democrats in the primary. That’s a great sign for a lot of different reasons. Our primary was post Kamala announcement so it’s a great little factoid there. We didn’t know whether it was going to increase turnout and by the way the Democrats arguably had more competitive primaries at the congressional level than we did so they still underperformed the Republicans by nearly 20 percent. That’s a great sign and part of that credit goes to chasing votes and ballots which we saw almost a direct correlation between how long our people have been out in the field and increases precinct by precinct. So, the map we’ve pulled out for Maricopa County—we’ve done a little bit of a heat map and we can see where with what we call our super chase territories across Maricopa County we can identify where we did better and increased and just compared that to the statewide and Maricopa County numbers as it compares to 2020.”
Since then, and up until the final moments of voter registration in Arizona, the picture has only gotten better. A recent report from NOTUS, headlined “Kamala Harris Has a Numbers Problem in Arizona,” explains how much more dire the state is for Democrats this year than it was in 2020. “Since 2020, Democrats have lost nearly 100,000 voters registered to their party,” NOTUS’s Jasmine Wright wrote for the piece earlier this week. “According to data compiled by Arizona-based strategist Stacy Pearson from state registration reports, Republicans now have more than 250,000 more registered voters than Democrats. And independents now have more than 100,000 more registered voters than Democrats, a shift from 2020, when Democrats surpassed indies by 20,000. With hundreds of voters moving into Arizona by the day — most registering as independents, giving them the option of voting in either party primary — Harris now has a problem Biden didn’t have when he won.”
With voter registration finalized, too, Republicans closed strong. Data from election officials, as reported by Kirk and others, shows the GOP with a massive advantage as compared with four years ago:
And that’s not to mention the polls, which show Trump with an advantage as well. The RealClearPolitics average shows Trump up a half a percent in the poll of polls in Arizona, and several recent surveys keep showing Trump gaining more and more in the state.
So, all the ingredients are there for Trump to take this one back—and make his path to 270 that much easier. The question now is whether the athletes on the field—the ballot chasers—will execute. Time will tell. But Bowyer is optimistic, at least for now.
“We’re really optimistic about the outcomes in the primaries in Arizona, and it’s increasing confidence that we can increase outcomes in some of these precincts by as much as five percent and some precincts up to 20 percent,” he said.
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