Last week, while Trump sat in a courtroom in downtown Manhattan, and Biden campaigned in Scranton by bringing reporters to see his childhood home, several dozen members of Pennsylvaniaâs Bucks County G.O.P. met for a hot-dog party at the American Legion post in Doylestown. Scott Presler, a MAGA activist and former leader of Gays for Trump, who has been travelling the country registering votersâand encouraging them to vote earlyâpulled his waist-length brown hair into a ponytail and took the microphone from a local plumber who was singing rock covers at the front of the room. âI use this term loosely, loosely, but Joe Biden âwonâ by eighty thousand votes in Pennsylvania in 2020,â Presler said, making air quotes with his fingers. âThereâs no do-over in this country. If we only vote on one day in 2024, Joe Biden will be President.â
The crowd sipped canned wine and hard seltzer. âThere are more than eighty thousand truckers in Pennsylvania,â Presler went on. âTheyâre hard at work on Election Day, hauling rigs so our stores have food. If they have mail-in ballots, we have the election.â
The theme of the eveningâs festivities was âsecure early voting.â Belief in election fraud has taken over much of the Republican mainstream; so has a skepticism of all forms of early voting, particularly mail-in voting. âAny time the mail is involved, youâre going to have cheating,â Trump said recently, in conversation with Nigel Farage. After Election Day in 2020, while votes were still being counted in Pennsylvania, Trump sent Rudy Giuliani to Philadelphia to insist that remaining mail-in ballots be thrown out; the Trump campaign later filed a lawsuit to either invalidate those ballots or prevent the state from certifying the election. (âGet rid of the ballots,â Trump had suggested, at a press briefing in September.) Preslerâs rebuttal to this line of thinking: âWhat if we have everybody vote on one day, and Iâm a Democrat, and I want to cause shenanigans? What if all of a sudden we run out of paper ballots on November 5, 2024? Democrats will have already voted, mail-in voted, early voted, done legal ballot chasing, and weâll be out of luck.â
The 2024 Presidential election could pivot on who wins Pennsylvania, one of the countryâs few remaining battleground states, and the one with the largest number of electoral votes. Trump won the Presidency in 2016 in part by turning Pennsylvania red; Biden prevailed in 2020 by taking it back. G.O.P. operatives now find themselves in an awkward position. Trump has coasted to the presumptive nomination by railing about how the Democrats stole the last election. (He won the stateâs primary handily Tuesday night, though more than sixteen per cent of the Republican vote went to Nikki Haley, who dropped out in March.) The Republican National Committee is involved in eighty-two âelection-integrityâ lawsuits, in twenty-five states. It has mounted efforts to get its own poll watchers not only to observe the 2024 election but to physically handle ballots. Its fund-raising robocalls cite âmassive fraudâ four years ago. Lara Trump, the newly installed co-chair of the R.N.C., and Trumpâs daughter-in-law, said, on a podcast last month, âThere are millions of peopleâIâm going to say seventy-five million plus Americansâwho are still, like, âWhat the hell happened in 2020?â They didnât get any answers. . . . They all feel like something was awry.â
And yet, in order to win this fall, Trumpâs campaign and the R.N.C. may have to embrace the very tactics theyâve denigrated. âEvery tool that the other side has used, we need to wield for ourselves,â Michael Whatley, the R.N.C. co-chair, wrote in a recent memo to staff. One of the R.N.C.âs greatest challenges will be to persuade Americans who could sway the election to believe in the system one more time. âWe have to start thinking about things like legal ballot-harvesting,â Lara Trump told the right-wing commentator Benny Johnson. âWe also have to embrace early voting.â
The embodiment of this effort is Scott Presler. âYouâre one of the few America First figures who doesnât just talk on Twitter,â Donald Trump, Jr., said, on his podcast, to Presler, who has 1.5 million Twitter followers. âYouâre on the ground day after day.â Sebastian Gorka, the short-lived Trump official and current talk-show host, described him as âthe face of the new G.O.P.âthe former RINO G.O.P.âwho actually gets out there as a citizen and does something to save the Republic.â Presler, an erstwhile Conservative Political Action Conference attendee who organized many of 2020âs Stop the Steal protests, worked for the Republican Party in Virginia, in 2016, but, according to Politico, was let go after allegedly posting photos online of a sexual encounter at the R.N.C.âs Virginia Beach office. (Presler didnât respond to a request for comment.) He was on the Capitol grounds on January 6th, for what he referred to as âAmericaâs largest civil rights protest in history.â He now works independently, with no official role, though Lara Trump refers to him as âa depiction of the grassroots movement in this country.â
Up close, the merger between the R.N.C. and the Trump campaign means a marriage between the county-level Party apparatus and activists like Presler. His aim is to register people for mail-in voting at farmersâ markets, Amish mud sales, gun shows, rodeos, Kid Rock concerts, and U.F.C. fights. At the Doylestown hot-dog party, he said, âI know itâs contentious, but I donât believe weâre going to be successful unless we have an all-of-the-above approach to voting.â As Lara Trump has put it, âWeâve got to bank enough votes going into November 5th that weâre not playing catch-up on Election Day. We need to swamp the system so it doesnât matter how many 3 A.M. drops they have or suitcases filled with ballots.â
At the American Legion post, everyone cheered as Presler strode up to the stage. âIf we on the right are saying a certain way of voting is fraudulent, we are limiting the ability of potentially millions of people to vote in our elections,â he said. He told the group that many of âour peopleââpolice officers, firefighters, the militaryâcanât vote at their precinct on Election Day. He added to that list the Amish, who have been traditionally reluctant to participate in elections but are now being rigorously courted as a G.O.P. constituency. âItâs kind of against Amish community values to vote, so when I tell them, âHey, you can get a mail-in ballot and itâs private and secret and sent to your house and you donât have to go out with your buggy,â thatâs something the Amish really like,â Presler said.
As the event concluded, Presler held up a sign showing that Bucks County is 1,589 registered voters away from flipping from Democratic to Republican. âThis is going to be, like, your Playgirl shoot,â Ellen Cox, a Bucks County G.O.P committee member, told him, as he posed for a photograph. âOh, my God, I love you,â she said. âNo more speakersâyouâre it. Itâs the Scott Presler show.â Presler told the group that he had just bought a home so that he could vote in Pennsylvania, where Republican registration is currently outpacing that of Democrats, but where, in the last election, Democrats requested double the number of mail-in ballots. According to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, a nonprofit news site, Republicans have gained voters in every county in the state during this registration cycle.
A long line of people formed to meet Presler and take photos with him. (He declined my request for an interview, both online and in person, though he did, during his remarks, welcome me and suggest that The New Yorker write more about Joe Bidenâs bad policies.) âYou used to have honest elections in this country,â a science teacher wearing a jacket with political buttons said. âThe election will be decided right here in Pennsylvania. It depends on whether the cemeteries will swing for Biden.â I sat with a woman in a Trump hat who told me, âTheyâre definitely going to try to steal it again.â
Several people recommended that I watch â2000 Mules,â Dinesh DâSouzaâs election-fraud film, which screened at Mar-a-Lago and claims that Democrats paid âmulesâ to deposit ballots, collected and trafficked from âstash houses,â in swing states. Attendees regaled me with tales of alleged fraud: a physical therapist who does in-home care described being in houses with âstacks of hoarded ballotsâ; someone else was living with a Craigslist roommate, a Democrat, who would drop off dozens of mail-in ballots every day leading up to the election; and so on.
Milo Morris, who wore a twill fedora, told me that for Republicans to win again, he had to correct his fellow-membersâ misimpressions about the election. âThereâs a lotta distrust,â he said. âYou gotta dispel that nonsense.â He gestured around the room. âYou have establishment people, the fringe people, all sides are coming together for this eternally constructive message,â he said. Bob Russel, who wore a blazer and khakis, told me, âThe new Republican base wants to fight fraud and irregularities by voting in person. Theyâre basically starting from scratch here.â He went on, âThis is Trumpâs election to mess up at this point. Not putting money into the mail-in effort and being more clear about urging people to use itâthatâs the one way I think he could not win the election.â
In Pennsylvania, though, these initiatives wouldnât be easy. In 2020, the state became a locus of the Stop the Steal protests, during which Trump loyalists aimed to disrupt the vote count in various places across the country. Al Schmidt, the Republican official who supervised Pennsylvaniaâs count, received death threats. Republican state legislators ended up selecting an alternate slate of electors, who signed certificates claiming that Trump won. By the 2022 midterms, most G.O.P. candidates in Pennsylvaniaâand everywhere elseâpublicly stated that they thought the 2020 election was stolen. Sixty-nine groups came to the state capitol, in Harrisburg, to sign an âElection Integrity Declaration,â which called for the abolition of almost all voting not done in person with photo I.D. and proof of citizenship. âWe are here to change our mind-set,â Presler told the group in Doylestown. âWe should have had a red wave in 2022, but we elected John Fetterman.â
When I called Schmidt, who is now the stateâs top election official, and asked how he was preparing for 2024, he told me, âWe need to speak to the seventy per cent of voters that rightly trust the integrity of our elections, and we need to speak to the thirty per cent that have concerns about our elections. But you have to differentiate between people asking questions because they want to know the answers and people asking questions because they want to undermine confidence in the process.â During my trip to Pennsylvania, it was difficult to distinguish between the groups that Schmidt sketched. Trump often encourages his supporters to get involved by poll-watching: âWhen you see them cheating, you get out there and start screaming.â Until recently, the R.N.C. had been banned from âpoll-watching activity,â in part because of accusations, in the nineteen-eighties, that it had sent armed off-duty police officers to intimidate voters in minority-heavy districts. (A federal consent decree was lifted in 2017.) Morris, in the fedora, told me, of the many voters he hopes to register or to convince to vote early, âTheyâre, like, âThis whole game is just ridiculous and Iâm not going to participate anymore.â The skepticism is hurting us. A lot of people are disenfranchised by the fraud allegations. Reactions can turn into accusationsââYouâre working for them.â â The goal, he said, was to get people who âthrew up their hands and said, âIâm out of it,â to now say, âHow can we make it better going forward?â Thatâs the mentality thatâs going to get us there.â
Ten days before the primary, Trump held a rally in the Lehigh Valley, the region that inspired âAllentown,â Billy Joelâs 1982 âblue-collar anthemâ about manufacturing plants closing down. Bill Bachenberg, a former board member of the N.R.A. and the chair of Pennsylvaniaâs slate of fake electors, had paid to rent the outdoor fairground for the rally. Attendees I talked to were more concerned about the integrity of the election than they were about Trumpâs current criminal trial, in New York. Among the Trump-merchandise stalls and food stands was a Turning Point Action booth, where a young volunteer and friend of Preslerâs was signing up the not insignificant portion of Trump-rally attendees who arenât registered to vote.
On my way in, I talked to a woman in Bikers for Trump leather gear who was attending her thirty-sixth rally. âWe know that the mail-in ballots were a big part of the fraud in 2020,â she said. âIâve been a poll watcher, machine operator, judge of elections for years. In 2020, they had police outside not letting people in. We need to change that for 2024. People need to know the rules. Call your sheriff. You canât count on any of the court systems. Theyâre all corrupt.â She told me that she was a January 6th defendant and had to get permission to be able to travel to the rally; sheâs now involved in registering people to vote and organizing rides to the polls for the elderly.