DOYLESTOWN, Pennsylvania — More often than not, Cliff Maloney finds himself knocking on the door of voters who still have a Trump flag blowing in the wind, who haven’t filled out their mail-in ballot or made plans to vote.
He is on a mission to get that voter out on Tuesday. It is a chase, he says, that will ultimately build an infrastructure and a red wall for next year and beyond.
Maloney, a Delaware County native, began this idea of chasing voters when he got a call from Charlie Kirk at Turning Point USA in early 2024, telling him they were doing a get-out-the-vote effort.
“Kirk said we’re doing Arizona, Wisconsin, and we need a ballot chase group, somebody we can trust to raise the money and hire a staff; so, we launched the PA ballot program a couple weeks later,” Maloney said of his grassroots organization efforts called Citizens Alliance.
“Before that, we typically knock a lot of doors for state-level candidates in certain states throughout the country. But this was the first time we did a big federal race, and instead of doing door advocacy, we were actually chasing ballots, which was the first time we’ve ever done that,” he said.
The objective was simple. If they could go from Trump winning 20% of the mail-in votes against Joe Biden in 2020 to 33% in 2024, their calculation was that Trump could not lose.
“So we knocked on 510,000 doors and Trump got 34.5% of the mail-in votes in Pennsylvania against Harris. He won the state, he won the White House,” said Maloney.
There is this great clip of the late Kirk crying on election night, when he finds out Trump won Pennsylvania, and his wife Erika walks in and hugs him while a guy is talking about why their efforts made this happen. The guy talking was Maloney.
Maloney soon realized after Republicans lost a very winnable state house seat in Lancaster in the Spring that this effort needed to be not an every four years thing or an every two years thing. It needed to be every year. They relaunched their efforts in August with 118 full-time staffers in Pennsylvania.
They have targeted 20 counties, 500,000 voters to chase. Their objective isn’t really about the state Supreme Court judicial retention races, where three incumbent justices, all Democrats, are waiting to see if voters give them another 10 years on the bench.
Republicans want all three to go down with a “no, no, no” campaign. Democrats want their guys to hold power. It’s not an easy campaign to conduct because people are used to contrasts between candidates, and this is just a yes or no vote. Consequently, there has only been one instance when a state Supreme Court justice lost their retention. That was during a highly contentious populist revolt against Democrats and Republicans in 2005, when voters were angry over a middle of the night pay raise vote the state legislature made.
“Obviously, we’re saying vote no at every door, but I always warn the activists and I warn the team there’s only been one retention race in the history of Pennsylvania where the judge was not retained. While I don’t want to sound like a pessimist, I’m a realist,” Maloney said.
The Pitt-Johnstown grad, who majored in mathematics, said the vote chase they are doing now is bigger than what happens on Tuesday. It is about building for the next generation in this state in places that will be up for grabs, not just next year’s midterm elections, but for the foreseeable future.
“I’m very much focused on congressional districts seven, eight, and 10 this year because my mindset is, if I can get an extra thousand to 1,500 people that didn’t vote last year that are Republicans, they are 100% going to vote next year,” he said.
All three seats Maloney focused on were won by Republicans by less than 5,000 votes: two held by freshman Republicans who upended Democrats last year and one by longtime Republican Rep. Scott Perry.
“That is the long-term battle,” he said.
Both parties are tight-lipped about their expectations for today. Maloney is focused on the long-term impact.
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“The whole point of what we’re doing is we’re trying to make Pennsylvania the red wall, and this is really a 2028 play in reverse. We are doing 500,000 doors this year. We’re going to do 750,000 doors next year. And we have committed to do a million doors in 2028 to maintain the White House, the Senate seat. We want to flip obviously our congressional targets, but also a million doors in 2028.”
It is a goal that began in August of this year: “The midterms and 2028 for us is already underway. We are laying the groundwork now and every day for the next three years,” said Maloney, adding, “You have to think big picture. You have to think, ‘What is our legacy,’ and then go for it.”