Conservative political action committee Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund is adopting a technologically-savvy ground game strategy of Democrats to encourage turnout for former President Donald Trump in crucial swing states.
In an interview on Breitbart News Saturday, Tea Party Patriots founder Jenny Beth Martin detailed the PAC’s most recent effort to put Trump back in the White House — a method called “relational organizing,” where a volunteer reaches out to their own contacts via call, text, or even in person to encourage them to vote.
The PAC’s method goes a step further, using an app called Numinar which accesses the volunteer’s contacts and notifies the volunteer of people they know who are either Republicans or lean Republican, but do not always participate in elections.
“Some people will have a couple to four or five who might match, and then other people are having anywhere from 20, 40, 50, and 60 people who match up,” Martin told host Matthew Boyle, Breitbart’s D.C. bureau chief.
“But every single one of those people are people who do not vote in every election. And we need to make sure that they’re voting for Trump and that they go and cast their ballot,” she continued. “And that’s what this app does. It gives you as the user the power to see: these are the most important people who I can have personal impact with to get them to vote.”
Users first download the Numinar app from the App store or Google Play and sign up for an account. Then they join the Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund Organization for their state. After that, the app will already have a selected targeted list of voters in the user’s state, and the user can allow the app to match their phone contacts to identify them, the PAC’s website instructs.
“This app helps you figure out which ones don’t normally vote, who do lean Republican, and then you can talk to them and get out the vote,” she added.
LISTEN:
Martin said the PAC was inspired by a article that ran in left-leaning Politico in 2022, which detailed how now-Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) used relational organizing tech to boost voter turnout by 3.8 percent, and how the same kind of method in Hampton Roads, Virginia, in 2021 increased voter turnout by 9.2 percent.
“I read that and it was about two weeks before election day, and I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, all these polls are wrong. This is going to be so much closer than anyone thinks.’ And I was actually right,” Martin recounted.
Martin said the PAC hopes to expand the strategy to other states besides swing states using its The Patriot Project app. But for now, the PAC is especially focused on swing states, where there has already been news of robust early-voter turnout.
“It’s very important that we do this. We are hearing that there’s this amazing turnout. A million voters have voted in Georgia already. North Carolina saw a record-breaking early voting this week, and that is great,” she said.
“The polling seems to indicate it’s going in Trump’s direction, but the polling in 2022 indicated it was going to be this landslide election for Republicans, and instead it was a squeaker of an election, as far as control of the House goes,” she warned. “This kind of technology can make all the difference if an election is somewhere in the neighborhood of a few hundred to maybe 10,000 or 20,000 votes. And that’s what it was like in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin in 2020.”
Martin noted that the technology can “make all the difference” in a close election, citing President Joe Biden’s narrow 11,779-vote victory in Georgia in 2020.
“Let’s think about specifically Arizona and Georgia because they were so incredibly close in 2020. And in Arizona, we have an attorney general now in their state that won by less than 250 votes. So do I think this app could make a difference if the election is that close? Absolutely,” she said.
“And we already have a few hundred people in each state using the app. So it would make that kind of difference absolutely. The app will be as effective as the number of people who use it,” she added.
Breitbart News Saturday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.