Let me hit you with a couple numbers that should make every Nevada Republican politician, donor, and party official physically ill.
In 2022, Republican Adam Laxalt lost the U.S. Senate race in Nevada by 7,928 votes.
In that same election, over 150,000 registered Nevada Republicans stayed home and did not vote.
That’s more than eighteen times the margin of defeat sitting on the sidelines.
Laxalt didn't lose because there weren’t enough registered Republicans or “election fraud.” He lost because Republicans didn't show up.
Let me give you another set of numbers.
In 2020, Republican Stavros Anthony lost his Clark County Commission race by 15 votes out of more than 150,000 votes cast.
15 VOTES!
Do you think more than 15 registered Republicans stayed home that election and didn’t cast a ballot? You better believe it.
So the GOP doesn’t have a registration problem. It has a turnout catastrophe.
Yet the people – party leaders and “professional” political consultants – responsible for fixing it have been failing at the job for years.
Here’s how the typical Republican GOTV (get out the vote) operation works.
A consultant gets hired. They recommend the same things they recommended last cycle. And the cycle before that. And the cycle before that.
Generic “remember to vote” postcards, social media posts, radio ads, billboards, and spam-texts get pumped out…and get completely ignored.
Election day comes. The consultant collects their fee. Takes credit for the wins and blames somebody else for the losses.
Then gets hired again next cycle. To do the same thing. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The Dumbest Piece of Advice in Politics
Now let's talk about door-knocking.
In every election cycle, the same piece of campaign advice gets regurgitated by “experts” as if Moses himself handed it down on a stone tablet from the mountain:
“You walk, you win. You don’t, you won’t.”
Pure, unadulterated nonsense. That’s a slogan, not a strategy.
Sure, some candidates who walk like machines and wear out a dozen pairs of tennis shoes win. But even more who do the exact same thing lose.
“Walking” is NOT some kind of magic potion. And none of the people who claim it is can prove it.
Worse, there are some of these “experts” foolishly telling candidates they should be walking non-partisan voters in the dead of summer with temperatures well over a hundred degrees.
Dumb, dumb, dumb.
Those voters aren’t paying attention to politics right now whatsoever. They’re at the pool, at their kid's baseball game – doing anything except thinking about a state Assembly race.
These non-partisan voters won’t even tune into campaigns until right around the time ballots start arriving in early October. And probably won’t make up their minds until early voting begins.
Look, the marketing rule for persuasion is to deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time.
Selling surfboards to Eskimos in the dead of winter isn’t exactly a brillant strategy.
A Different Approach
Again, the Republican Party doesn’t have a registration problem. It has a turnout problem.
Every dollar being wasted on registering new voters right now is a dollar not spent waking up Republicans who are already on the rolls.
And you don’t do that with generic postcards, social media posts, radio ads, and spam-texts reminding them when election day is.
Good grief. They already KNOW. But for a variety of reasons, don’t care.
This isn’t a problem of persuading non-partisans to vote Republican.
This is a problem of persuading Republican voters to simply vote. Because if they do, the overwhelming number of them are going to vote for the Republican candidate.
Duh.
The Sleeping Giant Project
After the June primary I began developing a new program to tackle this problem that’s completely different from what all the highly-paid consultants and armchair experts have been doing.
It’s called the Sleeping Giant Project. And its sole purpose is to boost GOP turnout.
The program is built around targeted, sustained, repeated, personally-addressed contacts…mail, phone, and in-person…timed to land just before mail ballots hit and through Election Day.
Not just one or two last-minute mailers, but a series of touches – including door-knocking – that keeps the candidate's name in front of the Republican low-propensity voters (LPV).
You know, when they’re making up their minds, not making plans for a Fourth of July picnic.
It’s based “social pressure” research identified by political scientists Donald Green and Alan Gerber – research, by the way, that was adopted by Democrats years ago.
The simple pressure point is to simply inform LPVs that their participation history is a matter of public record.
And when done correctly, turnout increases of eight percentage points or more have been the result.
More than enough to have made Adam Laxalt a U.S. senator.
Far more than enough to have elected Stavros Anthony as a Clark County commissioner.
And unlike every generic GOTV program ever run, this one is measurable.
You identify the LPVs before the election. Then afterwards, you compare that list to the list of voters who actually cast ballots.
Then, and only then, will you know if the program worked or not.
A real number. Not a consultant's self-serving boast.
Bottom Line
The Sleeping Giant Project is a far better approach – not because different is automatically better, but because the “way we’ve always done things” has demonstrably failed.
There’s a large, identified giant of already-registered/already-Republican voters in every competitive Nevada district whose ballots will automatically be mailed to them in October.
All it takes is trying something genuinely different to wake it up. As Donald Trump would say, what do you have to lose?