The Faith and Freedom Coalition, an organization created and chaired by Religious Right political operative Ralph Reed to mobilize conservative Christian voters, declared “WE WILL WIN” on Wednesday in a tweet seeking financial support for its massive get-out-the-vote operation for the 2018 midterm elections. Reed had declared back in June that the group would mobilize a “50-state grassroots army” to protect Republican control of Congress.
“Our goal is the largest turn out of evangelical and pro-life Catholic voters in a midterm election in the modern era,” Reed said in a press release last week. “This is the largest ground game directed at Christian voters in history, and with the Justice Brett Kavanaugh confirmation energizing millions of evangelicals, we expect it to have a major impact at the ballot box.”
The October 12 release included plenty of stats about the group’s operations:
Faith & Freedom Coalition volunteers have reached 1,716,840 voters of faith at their one millionth door today. Faith & Freedom has visited 1,009,906 homes of faith-based voters in advance of the 2018 mid-term election.
The home visits are concentrated in 21 states targeting mid-to-high propensity voters with a turnout score of 5 or above, as well as voters that data analytics have identified as either evangelicals or Roman Catholics, and have self-identified as pro-life, pro-marriage and pro-family. Using a smartphone app, 2,236 volunteers and 350 paid staff, working out of 39 field offices, are hanging door hangers, passing out voter guides, and using customized scripts to interact with voters based on their specific issue burden.
In addition, in the past two weeks Faith & Freedom has reached 13.4 million voters with voter education mail, placed 22 million digital ads on social media platforms, distributing 30 million voter guides in 117,000 churches, and will send out 13 million text messages to encourage Christian voters to go to the polls. …
The one millionth door knock comes on the heels of Faith and Freedom’s campaign in support of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation by the U.S. Senate, which included 4.9 million pieces of direct mail, over 500,000 peer-to-peer messages, one million emails, 985,000 digital ads placed to Christian voters in the states of swing-vote Senators, and over 85,000 phone calls placed to Senate offices from Faith & Freedom members and supporters urging Senators to vote to confirm Justice Kavanaugh.
The Faith and Freedom Coalition release also quoted Executive Director Tim Head:
“Our state and local leaders and volunteers are executing a state-of-the-art get-out-the-vote program that combines shoe leather politics with cutting-edge data analytics,” said Executive Director Tim Head. “The home visits are an integral part of our ground game, and we are well ahead of schedule to surpass the goal of visiting two million socially conservative households before November 6th.”
The coalition has also produced voter guides for Senate and House races in 28 states.
And of course Reed’s group is part of a much larger universe of right-wing organizations spending millions to drive a high turnout among the Republican Party’s base of conservative white evangelicals.
