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The Tom Woods Show
Ep. 2757 Will the Billionaires Unseat Massie? Cliff Maloney's Strategies for Election Victories
00:51:06
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- [00:02]
A
Get ready to take a flamethrower to the official narrative and learn what the elites don't want you to know. You're listening to the Tom Woods Show.
- [00:19]
B
Hey, everybody, Tom woods here. We got the great Cliff Maloney, CEO of Citizens alliance, back with us today. We have a ton of things to talk to him about, but he's got a brand new book. Now, I. I know I got some people who aren't interested in politics, okay? But politics is interested in you, as they say. And Cliff has just this week released a book called Run Right A Complete Election Playbook to Win. Let me. Let me tell you something about this. I have no intention of ever running for office, and yet I read every word of this thing. And what's great about it is it shows you exactly what you need to know and what you need to do if you have any chance of success. And I think the reason this is especially valuable for the sort of people who listen to this show is that I think some of us feel like as long as we have the right ideas and we can give a good speech, everything else will just fall into place. But when you deal with a guy like Cliff, who's been around for a long time, I mean, you can see he's not that old, but he's been around a long time in terms of how much work he's put into this. He knows the real score about exactly what it is you need to know in order to succeed and the strategy you need to pursue and the ducks you need to get in a row. He knows all that stuff. And it turns out that this stuff that we feel like, that'll just kind of take care of itself. That is the thing. Like, that's the thing. And if one side knows how to do that and the other side just thinks, well, I can give some pretty speeches. I think we know how this is going to turn out. So, Cliff, I'm glad to have you.
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A
Thank you, Tom, as always. Glad to be here. Appreciate you having me.
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B
In a perfect world, maybe our series of intellectual propositions really ought to be sufficient. You know, in an unfallen world, maybe it would be, but it evidently is not. Now, you have in here, you have 18 things that need to be set up and lined up. And as I looked at them, I thought, well, some of this is familiar to me from what I know from Cliff's work. But Jesus, this in level of detail. I want to start with the question of numbers, because again, a lot of us who are naive, let's say, about politics, and when I say naive. I really just mean kind of uninformed. Sometimes we feel like, well, this task before us is insurmountable because it would involve educating all of America or changing the minds of all of America, or cutting through the mainstream media for all of America. And you make clear that the kind of people you are really, really going after is a little bit more narrow than that. So what's that all about?
- [02:52]
A
Well, let me start with a quick story, Tom. So back in 2017, I was sitting in a room with Rand Paul and Thomas Massie, and there was a Republican seat for Congress that opened up and it was a red seat. Whoever won the primary was going to be the congressman. I'll never forget this moment. I think Thomas Massie said, well, do we have someone that's a Liberty candidate running? And Rand Paul leaned in and said, no, we don't ever have a candidate running. It was like this kind of, this, I don't want to say pessimist moment, but moment of like, wow, like, you know, talk about not having hope. And I kind of said, well, who's in charge of kind of building this bench? Who's in charge of making sure that we do have Liberty candidates that want to run? And that's when they both looked at me and were like, well, you know, go out and build it. And that was kind of the start of this. That was the start of understanding that there are libertarians out there, there are liberty leaning Republicans out there that believe in our cause, but we really need to figure out a way to teach them how to actually run for office and be effective. And so the two things that we look for, Tom, the candidate needs to be principled and the candidate needs to be viable. There's a lot of viable candidates out there that have no principles, right? We deal with these people all day. We see them all the time, right? Giving interviews, doing this. They have no principles whatsoever. But they're viable because they have money, they know how to run, they've got the right consultants. There's tons of principal candidates out there that aren't viable, right? I call these the 1 percenters. They're good friends of ours, they're good people, but there's no actual plan for them to be viable to win the seat. So the point of the 18 steps is to put together an actual plan for someone to go from soup to nuts having no idea what they're getting into. But if they're principled, we're going to teach them how to be viable. That's the point of those 18 steps.
- [04:36]
B
So let's say you have a person who is. Well, first of all, I would say, though, there are some deficiencies in a candidate that even if you did line up all these things just so, and you had the endorsements set up and you had your fundraising plan, and you'd look, you'd study the district to make sure it's winnable, you know, you'd done all this stuff. But if the person is, let's say, a really, really atrociously bad public speaker, is that insurmountable, or can you even overcome that?
- [05:07]
A
Well, let's look at Massie's race right now, right? Ed Gowran, his opponent, is running what we call the Biden basement campaign, right? He's not out there speaking. He's not out there doing anything because anytime he speaks publicly, he's losing points. But yet that's a narrow race. So, yeah, I think there's plenty of races where there are what some would think are insurmountable. This is what I always tell people. People think there's this big debate moment when you're running for dog catcher, you're running for city council, you're running for state house. I think the debate is going to be the crucial moment. Even in the presidential debate, roughly 60% of Americans watched the debate, right? That means 40% didn't. And that's the presidential debate. This is why we always tell people it's the blocking and tackling of campaigns that matters. It's not these big moments, these gotchas, you know, these things where this is what I say to most libertarians. They think when somebody walks into the voting booth, that they're gonna see candidate A's message, candidate B's message, candidate C's message, and they're gonna think to themselves, who do I most align with? The reality is, most people are walking in, they're not even looking at the names. They're just voting for the party, right? And so to break through some of that and to try to fix some of those things, that's why the district, as you said, we talk a lot about picking the right district, pick the right race, the right district to run in, because a lot of times things are already settled. You're just trying to move a couple percentage points to figure out how you can put yourself in the driver's seat.
- [06:36]
B
Now, I want you to take a minute. Even though this is unlike a lot of the other topics in here, this is one you've spoken an awful lot about, like, over and over and over again. And that is the door knocking strategy. I would actually like to hear a bit about that because I was at your Citizens alliance event in Florida not too long ago, and I was very interested in what you guys had done. And I want to say as a, as a sneak preview, that a little later on in the conversation, we're going to talk about the Thomas Massie race where you guys are doing some door knocking. This is not, though, the kind of door knocking that I would have done for pat Buchanan in 1992, where you actually have some campaign literature. You knock on the door and you say, hello, I'm out here, you know, risking my life, campaigning for Pat Buchanan. What exactly is involved in the door knocking?
- [07:24]
A
Yeah, let me give a little backstory. So in 2016, when Rand Paul ran for Senate, when he was reelected, obviously the same night that Trump won the White House the first time, Rand Paul, after his presidential race, had to drop out and then refile for Senate in Kentucky. So me and Justin Grice, my right hand guy, you know, we were heavily involved in the ground game there. And we noticed one thing that was very, very just intriguing to me and that was that the Democrats and Republicans, meaning Rand's campaign and his opponent, they spent money on all the same things, right? You had tv, you had digital ads, you had texting, you had mailers, you had radio ads. All the above were equal. We had volunteers, the left had volunteers. But there was one major difference. The Democrats had paid door knockers. Now, we won the race. But this was kind of the post analysis, if you will, the post op of, okay, what happened? How did we do? What could we do better? And I'm like, man, they paid a lot of money for these door to door folks. And I kind of looked around, I poked around with other Republican campaigns and most Republicans, whether establishment or liberty folks, they weren't doing this. And so this was kind of the start of me thinking, you know, maybe we should be doing this. So when I was running Young Americans for Liberty, we launched this program, Operation Win at the Door, which is still going strong today. But that was 2018 was the first cycle, 2020, the second cycle. Then we launched Citizens alliance, so 2022 with them. And it just became really apparent that when you knock on these doors, you really can reach voters. And I want to give you the statistics because I know, I know your audience is, you know, much deeper than a lot of the Fox News audience tend to be. When we did this, we did it organically, but then we went back to the literature. So the left has a Book called get out the Vote. And I talk about it in run, right? Because it's just they did like 20 or 30 years of studies to find out that all these electioneering methods, they've tracked them, they've seen what works and what doesn't work. And when you look at the list, if you do lit drops, meaning you just go to the door and you drop a piece of literature, you're not talking to anybody, you're talking hundreds of pieces of literature you have to drop to earn one new vote, right? When it comes to phone conversations, you're talking, I mean, you gotta have over 30 phone conversations to earn one new vote. And here's the question I ask people. How many times are you picking up for a number that you don't know? These days it's practically zero, right? Most of us have spam blocker on or yeah, you're not picking up. So that number is probably astronomically higher. But the number that I stick with, the number that really makes me know that what we're doing at the door when we're door knocking, why it works. Nine conversations at the door equals a new vote. And so, you know, I talk about this in the book because our tagline is doors win wars. Because we not only believe it, but we've proved it. We see it in a lot of these races. And so this is why I'm all in on door knocking. By the way, Tom, it is great job security because all the consultants want to do TV ads. They make their 15% commission, they get a referral, so they work with a professional class. In 2024, we ran the phase program for Trump. And I can get into that if you want me to. We've talked about it on a previous show, but I always tell people like to hire 120 individuals that are full timers, you know, you gotta interview. We had 1100 people apply, we had to interview 6 to 700 people. Like these are huge processes. And the establishment, most of the consultants, they just don't want to deal with it. But the left has done it for years now we're doing on the Right for Liberty battles and we've proven it works.
- [11:01]
B
Maybe that's a symptom of this feeling that if we do things that seem big, like tv, that seems big, everybody sees TV without thinking about, well, what but what actually is going to get. If that gets the most votes for the bang for the buck, then great. But maybe it doesn't. Like outside of politics and just general marketing, big companies will get told by their marketing Agencies, they should have billboards all over the place. You can't test, you almost never can test the efficacy of a billboard. That's the way the marketing agency likes it. There's no way to know if they're doing well or doing badly. So they're always urging them, well, you need brand awareness. So do all this, that and the other thing. Whereas what I've liked about what you've done from the beginning is that you are focused on the numbers. I just want to do what works. I don't care if it's high profile and sexy or if it's boring and drudgery, as long as it works.
- [11:51]
A
Yeah. And I think, you know, winning is key. I always say this to a lot of our liberty friends that losers don't legislate. Right? That's like how we open our training. And I don't mean you need to compromise. You need to sell out to win, but figure out a way that you can actually do something that works. And, you know, I just have to say this. I really feel like people, people always tell me, like, well, why don't we pull all of our money out of tv? Why don't we pull all of our money out? Why don't we put everything in the doors? No, no, you have to have parity, right? You have to go to match your opponent. And so there are certain situations where, yeah, you need to be spending tons of money on tv, tons of money on digital, tons of money on mail. But what you can't do is let your opponent spend $100,000 knocking doors with paid canvassers and you're just relying on volunteers. And I think it's been an epidemic time within the Republican Party that that has been the situation. And I talk about in the book where it's like people ask me who are your biggest opponents, and they expect me to say the communists or the far left or the squad. It's the Republican establishment, It's the Republican apparatus. It's the Republican consultants who are driving all this money that should be spent directly on some of these ground games. And it's just they put it into the TV ether. Like you said, it's a big thing. They think it's the Karl Rove age where you have to have the perfect message going into election day. And Tom, the thing that most don't understand is during COVID the craziness which you obviously exposed, which I appreciate, you were like my one sane guy. During COVID During COVID they changed all the rules. And so now a lot of These states, it's not just election day, it's not election week, it's not election month, it's election season. And so when people ask me about the efficacy of door knocking, it has become even more impactful because you don't have a game of trying to hit the persuadables anymore. You have such a long Runway that you're trying to get as many of your people out to vote as possible. It's base. It's a turnout game. And what is the best thing for turnout? Face to face conversations. And instead of having one day to do that, I now in states like Pennsylvania, I have 50 days to do that. So that's what makes the door knocking that much more impactful. And by the way, the Republicans, as much as they've woken up and the consultants are kind of realizing it, we're still 10 years behind the Democrats and understanding how to funnel money to the right things instead of just these TV buys where they're getting paid millions of dollars in referral fees.
- [14:26]
B
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- [16:30]
A
Yeah, so we did this activity called the Leesburg Grid, and I'll talk about it a little while here. So the Leesburg Grid is, is something that Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, Nancy Pelosi, you know, Thune in the Senate, and you've got Mike Johnson in the House. This is something that they do every week. And people think, I'm like, using hyperbole. They do this, okay? The establishment in politics, they do this. The leaders in your state, they do this. So the Leesburg Grid is a simple confrontational politics model that shows there are four grids. And when you're developing your message, it's important that you sit down with trusted individuals, people that you know, people that can hear kind of the, the depths, I don't want to say of the secrets or the skeletons in the closet, but you have to sit down. If you're going to run for office, you need to do this exercise. Because some people do this exercise, Tom, and they decide, you know what? It's not for me. I'm not going to run. It's too much. Right. So I encourage people to sit down and do it. So the four quadrants are simple. Number one is you write down and look, people do this in a room where they put sticky notes on the wall of each of the four walls and they fill the walls. Right. You should have at least 50 different adjectives or things to describe each of the four quadrants. I'm about to lay out number one, what do you want voters to think about you when they walk in the voting booth? And so this can be, you know, conservative, liberty lover, a veteran, a husband, a father. Yeah, you go down the list of things. They're political and personal. So those are the two things. But these are all what you want voters to think of you? The second quadrant to the right is going to be what do you want voters to think of your opponent? Okay, so what are you trying to get voters? When they think of your opponent's name, what are they thinking of? So these are his negatives, right? Your opponent's negatives. The bottom left quadrant is going to be what does your opponent want people to think of? Themselves, right? So you're guessing. Hey, and look, if you're running against an incumbent, it's easy. Pull up their website, right? What are the issues on their issue page? How are they describing themselves in speeches? That's easy. Bottom right is what does your opponent want people to think about you? And this is where we go to some dark areas. Tom, what is your opponent want people to think about you? These are all the negatives. This is the oppo research. This is the, hey, I had a DUI when I was 19 years old, right? This was, oh, you know, this happened back then. I had some bankruptcy case. What are the negatives that they're going to run when they run the negative ads? And here's the whole rule. Stay out of the bottom quadrants because those are your opponents messaging. You want to stay up in the first and second quadrant to talk about the things that are what you want people to think about you and what you want people to think about your opponent. And each of these quadrants, you might have 50 or 100 different adjectives laid out. What you have to do is you have to narrow it down to three. You narrow it down to three in each of these quadrants. Obviously the top two are the ones we care about, but that is your messaging. And by the way, Tom, I don't, I don't like talking points. I don't like pushing people, you know, to keep it simple. We all loved the Ron Paul super brochure back in the day, laid out everything. We believed it. But as a political strategist, you realize, oh, wait, there's a problem here, there's too much. Right? You have to keep things simple for the voters. You have to break it down. And so once we pick the three in each of the quadrants, those are what we focus on. The whole campaign is getting voters to understand those three things and making sure when they walk in the voting booth, they're thinking of one. When I hear my name, here are the three things. And when they hear my opponent's name, here are the three things.
- [20:19]
B
This is so foreign to the way I do pretty much everything in my life, you know, Totally foreign. But at the same time, I. I want to be effective. Right. So I would sit down and listen to you as you tell me these things that I need to be prepared for, that I need to do. By the way, I assume a campaign, a potential consultant or a campaign manager sits down with the candidate and says, all right, listen, if we're going to do this, you have to tell me right now, every single skeleton in that closet of yours, I need to know it right now. I need you to treat me like I'm your parish priest and tell me everything. I assume that conversation happens.
- [20:56]
A
Yeah. And honestly, even at the state level, you know, we do oppo research on ourselves, right. This is something that people think. Like, I'm kidding when I say that. But you hire a. We have research firms and you. And it costs. I mean, it costs five to $10,000, but it's worth it because your opponent's going to do it, just like we're going to do it on our opponent. But you do oppo research on yourself to kind of see what is out there publicly. You know, if we hire somebody, and by the way, anyone, even if you're not running for office, it's a fun activity to do, right? To say to yourself, hey, I'm going to hire somebody to do oppo research and just see what comes back. Right. Sometimes it can be a little scary, but yeah, I mean, this is the toughest conversation to have, which is to sit down. Usually it's the candidate and their spouse. Sometimes, you know, you'll have a field manager or a campaign manager, but it's four to five people, and it's like, hey, tell me your deepest, darkest secrets, because if you run for this office, it's going to come out. And it's not a fun conversation to have. Tom, one thing you mentioned was fundraising. I'd love to just take a couple seconds to dive in on this, please. This is probably for liberty candidates, for people that actually believe in the principles of liberty and want to win. This is by far the number one failure point. This is where we fail, is we think we're going to run and we think that the grassroots are going to rally around this, which they typically do if you actually believe in the principles. But when you're outspend 10 to 1. And when we start these races, I mean, we poll a lot of times and people think that their name ID is going to be, you know, 50%. Most non incumbents, when we do a first poll and we look for name ID are at less than 4%. Let me say it one more time. So if we poll a state House district or even a congressional district with a state House member who's already elected, they're always in single digits, right? Voters just are not as aware as those in the political class or those in the activist class think that they are. They're just not. So when we do our training, one of the and I talk about this in the book, one of the big steps is to take a full hour and folks can find out more. It's runwritebook.com runwrightbook.com we take a whole hour to talk about fundraising. And the first question I ask is this. If we're in Pennsylvania, I say the average Pennsylvania state House winning Liberty Republican raised and spent $150,000. This is 20, 24, those numbers. And I asked the room, I say, how are you going to raise $150,000? I'm not here to tell you that I like that. That's the amount. I'm not an advocate for that being the process. But you're here to win. And so what's your plan to raise $150,000? Because that's what the average winner raised. Some of them spent a million dollars, some of them spent, you know, $10,000. But let's at least aim for what the average winner raised to be able to be competitive. And Tom, half the people in the room, I'm not saying I'm trying to talk them out of running for office, but you know, the folks that show up with the neck beards and their guts hanging out over their shirt and they're 19 years old, they don't have any connections. We got time, right? We got other things that they can work on. The guy's running who's really put together, but he's in the wrong district. It's a D plus 30 district. We got to get him to move or to figure out, you know, maybe he shouldn't be running for office. So we might have 50 people show up to a training, 25 of them are not, you know, ready to run or in the right district. And out of the 25 that are, maybe we get 10 of them to actually run. We endorse them, we support them. But it's the toughest conversation to have, which is you have to raise money, because if your opponent is sending 50 pieces of mail and is paying door knockers and is on TV, radio and digital ads and you have raised $1,000 to send a couple pieces of mail, there's no way to compete. So I Always tell people, I'm not here to advocate, that raising money is a fun thing or a good thing, but I want to win. And I've seen countless Liberty candidates that just refuse to acknowledge this. And then at the end of the day, they say, well, I gave it my best shot. Stop giving it your best shot. Do what you need to do to win. This is how we've pulled off over 400 electoral victories at the state level is teaching people, you've got to grind it out. You've got to fundraise. And when you do, Liberty wins. We can win campaigns, and then we can legislate for Liberty. That's the objective.
- [25:30]
B
You also have to think about. You know, of course you have to recruit volunteers, but you have to get allies and endorsements. You have a section on this, and in some cases, I've seen a candidate who's charismatic enough that people come to him, I want to give you an endorsement, but you can't rely on that. You have to be the one to go out and drum those up. So you're saying that before you even announce, you've already come up with a plan of, well, in my ideal world, I would get the following endorsements. Maybe I'll only get half of these. But you've already thought that out. You're not flying by the seat of your pants on this.
- [26:04]
A
Yeah. And here's why I love this exercise, because sometimes candidates will think, oh, of course such and such will endorse me. Of course this politician will endorse me. Of course Rand Paul will endorse me. Of course national association for Gun Rights will endorse me. And then you go have the conversations with those individuals or those organizations, and they're like, oh, no, no, we can't endorse in this race because of this reason. We can't endorse in this race because, you know, the incumbent's actually been good on our issue. It can signal to you that, look, there's not going to be that support out there that you thought, maybe I shouldn't run. But yes. I mean, the thing that we have as principled candidates is we have beliefs, we have a soul. Tom. Right. Most of these. Most of these incumbents, they're part of the system, right? Not all of them are evil, but most of them, they have no standards. They have no set of principles. That's not what's guiding them. What's guiding them is what we call access. Okay, we talk a lot about access versus power. And what do those two things mean? We talk about in the book, like Access is. Oh, the congressman, you know, I have his number. I can call him, right? Oh, the congressman invited me to a nice. The governor is putting me on a study committee to figure out if we should get rid of the income tax. You know, what power is, Tom? Power is getting rid of the income tax.
- [27:20]
B
Right.
- [27:21]
A
Is actually doing the thing that impacts policy, that actually sets, you know, legislation in order. So we talk about these endorsements because you need to go to these folks and as principal people, we can fill out surveys, we can fill out the gun surveys, we can fill out the pro life surveys, we can fill out the tax surveys that say we're never going to vote for a tax increase. A lot of the incumbents, they're hesitant on that. The establishment, the caucus, if you will, the powers that be, don't sign those pledges because we're going to have to make a compromise. We don't want them to have ammunition to go after you. So, yes, we encourage all of our candidates to fill out those surveys, go on the record and try to get those endorsements. And if groups are signaling to you, maybe they're not going to get involved. It can kind of help you judge whether you should get in or not.
- [28:08]
B
Yeah, you definitely don't want to be finding that out after you've gotten yourself out there, and then it just becomes embarrassing. I don't want to skip ahead. I want to do one more big topic before get out the vote. When you talk about data and software and the intel you'll need, what is this? Is it a demographic breakdown of the district? Is it past voting patterns? You know, according to polls? Like, what information am I trying to gather?
- [28:34]
A
Yeah. So understand that most of the races just generically across the country, especially at the state level, if you're running, most races are primary only. Right. I mean, it's probably 5% of seats in the country that are actually, hey, we have a general election. So the reason I'm saying that is a lot of times the data that you're trying to pull and all this is public. Every state's different. By the way, states like North Dakota, not only do you not have party registration, they don't even register to vote. Right. So that's very different than a state like Pennsylvania where we have not just registration, but also bipartisan and the primaries are closed. Right. So I want to caveat it by saying that there's different rules in every state, but in most states, you're running in a primary, and if you're a Liberty Republican, you're targeting Republicans that typically vote. And the data, you know, it's pretty incredible how much you can get. I mean, when you, when you really dive deep. Like right now we have mail in ballots for the primary. The primary is May 19th in Pennsylvania. And so right now mail ballots are going out and you actually can know not just who requested a mail in ballot, but every 24 hours, the Secretary of State will update who has sent it back. So we actually track in real time. Like when I go to a door and I'm looking at our app, like the PA Chase app, I actually know not just the person I'm there to target. I know every registered voter in that household. I know all of their voting history. So the last four general elections, have they voted and how many times? What's their frequency? I have an affinity score. This is something that we get from i360, a data company that tells me how conservative we think they are based on consumer data based on a lot of these different variables. Not always accurate, but pretty good to know, you know, if they're a 50 versus a 99. Right. If they're a woods 100, okay, we can go in, we can talk about ending the Fed, even though we're in, you know, Doylestown, pa. So all that data is there, but also whether they requested a ballot, whether it was sent back, etc. So you have. Everybody thinks that, oh, the data is going to be, you know, oh, do we know the dog's name or do we know this little factoid? Most of what you're trying to do, though, is you have the data to know who's there. You're just trying to get them to actually vote. Right? That's the big ask is how do we get you to vote? But I have seen countless campaigns, Tom, where they don't even, they just, they don't understand. Like, they're knocking on random doors, they're sending mailers to every registered voter. It's like, listen, the same 10,000 Republicans vote in this primary practically every four years. That's who you want to target. And if you run into these folks that say, hey, we're going to win the election by getting new voters, we're going to register new voters. We're going to get Democrats to switch, we're going to get independents to switch. This is my advice. Run. Do not walk away from that individual. Run away from them.
- [31:25]
B
Hey, everybody, Tom woods here with a quick tip for small business owners. If your business isn't showing up online, your competitors are getting the leads, and you're missing out. That's where Persist SEO comes in. For over 15 years, they've been helping local businesses grow through SEO, paid ads and the latest in AI powered search optimization so you stay visible and competitive in the digital age. Whether you're in home services, legal or healthcare, Persist SEO delivers real results without locking you into long term contracts or overwhelming you with tech jargon. Visit Ineedseo Help or call 770-580-3736 to schedule your free consultation. That's Ineedseo Help. Easy to remember, powerful for your small business. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And by the way, it's not just in politics, Cliff. I have heard people organizing speaking engagements which, you know, I used to do a lot of, and they would be promising me the size of the crowd they were going to get. And this is the first event they had ever planned. Oh, we're going to fill this thing. And I said, you're going to get 150 people. And they what? No way. Everybody's going to love this. They're all going to come out and sure enough, if it isn't 150 on the nose, Cliff, you know, so yeah, you got to know what you're talking about, stuff like this. So obviously get out the vote is the big thing. And I know that again, somebody like me, I want to look down on that, like this is, this should just be an intellectual contest, doggone it, but it isn't. So get out the vote. But then you have in your chapter title for that it says get out the vote parentheses because most voters really don't care. Sorry. So what does that mean? Like we have to not quite coerce them physically, but we have to really, really, really go out of our way to make sure they get to the polling place. Is that what you mean?
- [33:21]
A
So Abraham Lincoln, which I never thought I would quote on the Tom woods show, but Abraham Lincoln. I talk about this a little bit in the book. He has something called, now we call it the Lincoln Four step. And it's very simple and even though it's hundreds of years old, it's very accurate. And that is this step one, as you said about the data, get a list of all likely voters, right? Understand that. Get that list. Identify who are the people we're trying to talk to because they're going to vote. Step two, ascertain who do they support, right? So you go through and whether it's, whether it's through polling, whether it's through door knocking, whether it's through texting, you kind of build a list of, okay, who is supporting who. Step three. Of the people that are not supporting me, if I'm the candidate, try to persuade them. Work it, work it, work it. For those that you persuade, great. For those of you don't, okay, step four. And this is the get out the vote. This is the point to me saying this. Step four. At that point, you only focus on those people that are your supporters, and you make sure that every one of them votes you get out the vote. But this is a big problem that I find a lot of campaigns, they're trying to get out the vote to all Republicans in a primary, or they're trying to get out the vote to as many voters as possible in a general election. No, focus all of your energy on turning out the people that you know are your supporters in a primary. And this is something that guys, I've seen, even county parties, state parties, you know, a lot of these imbeciles, they just don't quite grasp. Like, you have to just focus your time, whether it's door knocking, those folks, calling them, texting them. Tom Biden's playbook. In 2020, we got a copy of it for Pennsylvania, his strategy. And it was kind of interesting because at one point, there's a slide that talks about annoying the voter. And they. They would go back to the door of these Democrats every seven days with the same person. And in 2024, we adopted this strategy. We didn't call it annoying the voter. We called it a reminder campaign. But what we realized is these folks are not going to change their party. They're not going to vote for somebody else. They're very partisan. They just need to be annoyed. They need to be reminded. And so a lot of the get out the vote is just, hey, Bob, we need you to vote. We're going to keep coming back. Bob's not really that into politics. He's not a consistent voter. But if Bob votes, he's voting Republican. And so I don't want to say that that's what politics has become. But, yes, so much of get out the vote is just do the work to remind these people, hey, you need to vote, period.
- [36:03]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's incredible how much that can move the needle. And I can't help continuing to note that some of the principles you're talking about apply beyond politics. So an example I've given a lot is suppose you want to write a book, you got it all set, and you go to the publisher and they ask you basic questions like, who's the intended audience of this book. And you give the answer everybody. So they immediately shake their heads like, come on, man, you know that's not right. Unless you get an Oprah endorsement. And even then it's not for everybody. You have to figure out who is the likely buyer of the book. And so I give the example. I have a book, who Killed the Constitution? And it probably did the least well among the least well of all my books. Some of them did great, some not so great. Because the subtitle in effect implied that, well, everybody's responsible for killing the Constitution. You know, the left, the right, nobody is. There's no market for that. Nobody wants to be told you're the problem. Like they want to be told my enemy is the problem and I'm the. Now that doesn't mean that you can't write that book for the pure intellectual edification of it. Of course, nothing's stopping you. But go into that with your eyes open that unfortunately, mankind being what it is, they don't want to be scolded. And also, for example, when I wrote Meltdown and they, they actually asked me, well, who's the intended audience? And I really, I really did tell them. I said, well, everybody's interested in what's going on. And they said, yeah, but not everybody wants a Tom woods take on it, right? Not everybody wants that. So they gave me an extremely partisan subtitle to that book that I was very upset about. I was young and naive, Cliff. I was very upset about. But they understood the market better than I did because they knew that that subtitle identifies me as the person that target market wants to hear from. And that works way better than taking a no name author like me and trying to get the entire country to buy his book about the financial crisis. It's not going to happen. All right, let's move on to something that I know everybody would be interested in, which is the race, the primary contest with Thomas Massie in Kentucky. Because I would dare say virtually everybody who listens to me has an interest in that and is tends to be a Massey partisan, I would say. And you guys have been doing some door knocking for him. What we keep hearing is the prediction markets keep saying Massey's going to win, but Massie keeps trying to go out and correct people who think that the prediction markets are polls. So if the prediction markets say there's a 66% chance that Massey will win, they take that as Massey's ahead 66 to 34. No, he isn't. He's ahead by single digits according to Massey himself. And he's saying, don't get complacent. I still need some help here. So what can you tell us from what you're seeing?
- [38:48]
A
Well, let me start by saying this because I'm going to break a big rule of mine, which is once again, when I tell people what I'm doing in the race, I hope that they are not going to call me out and say, oh, I thought you said we just need the knock doors. So we are knocking about 160,000 doors for Thomas. We've knocked about 120, 125,000 so far. May 19th is a primary. So for those watching, you know, we're a couple weeks away. And I want to be very, very clear. There's a chance Thomas Massie loses this race. That's not hyperbole, that's not sensationalism. Polling that I've seen, he's up 3. Some of the better polls have him up 8. I've seen a poll with him down 4. Let me say that one more time. I've seen a poll with Thomas by an actual pollster, somebody that I actually respect, that has him down four points, 44 to 40. So this is a real race. And so what we're doing is, yes, we're knocking the doors, we've got a ton of people on the ground, but we're also handling something meaning, you know, kind of his, his independent expenditure, that is his opponent's negatives are so low that we are out there and we are raising money to the tunes of millions, right? Because, I mean, AIPAC and some of these groups are going to be. They're spending upwards of 10 to 15 million dollars is where I think they're going to land. And so what I'm doing is I'm running it into. I'm helping raise funds, not just for Doors, but for negative TV ads against Ed Galrino, as we'll call him, his name Ed Galrhine, to expose some of his negatives. Because, look, they're not spending the money to talk about the war in Iran. They're not spending the money to talk about why Thomas is the lone vote on X, Y or Z. They're just claiming that he is anti Trump, that he's a liberal Republican, that he's a moderate, that he sold his soul. We need to run negatives based on the polling, we need to run negatives on his opponent. And so, just like the book, I like to win, right? That's the one thing a lot of libertarians don't do, is win. So I am out there. Folks want to get involved. Doorswinwars.com youm can chip in, you can sponsor a door knock or help us to pay for these ads. I think this is one of the most important races for the entire liberty movement. And so, you know, Thomas asked me a couple months ago, he said, hey, listen, like you told me, if there's ever a moment, I need your help. You know, I know you're knocking doors. I know you're not doing federal races. Can you get involved here? And it's like, I'm at the guy's wedding. He's a great friend of mine. This is the fight. And anyone who believes in the principles of liberty, any Ron Paul Republicans out there, Ron Paul libertarians, people that came to this movement, doors. WinWars.com this is the fight and the one piece we have to fix over the next couple weeks before May 19th. We've got to get the negatives up of his opponent. And if we do that, I think we're going to have a very close race, but I think we win.
- [41:40]
B
Hey gang. I am holding in my hand the answer to the problem being on a godforsaken screen 24 hours a day. This is the Tom Woods Elite Letter with fresh content not seen in my email newsletters and delivered to your physical mailbox. Remember that thing? In a world of screens and email newsletters and PDFs and eBooks and E readers, it's published on actual paper that you hold in your hand. Those of you above a certain age, like me, will remember when we used to hold paper in our hands and read words off it. Those were better times, my friends. Be proudly old school with me and make your stand for the simple pleasures of yesteryear. Physical reading material delivered to your physical mailbox. There is no PDF version and there's nothing virtual about it. Oh, and by the way, subscribing to the Tom Woods Elite Letter also entitles you to free entry and into any of my murder mystery dinner parties across the country. And that's just when you subscribe at the entry level. Even more fantastic goods await you at the higher level. So imagine it every month in your mailbox. Brand new woods material and you don't have to read it on a godforsaken screen. Make a stand against the digitalization of everything and bring back the days of reading something paper based in your recliner with the dog at your feet. Check it out@supportinglisteners.com that's supportinglisteners.com well, look, it's very Sensitive. The Israel question is very sensitive. But what I would think is not sensitive is do I really want three outside billionaires who don't live in Kentucky deciding who my representative is? I mean, is that. That's absolutely not a line of argument that you can pursue?
- [43:24]
A
No, I think it is. I mean, that's what a lot of Massie's ads are. Right. I mean, if you follow his Twitter account, Onyx, I mean, it's, you know, that's a big talking point. The problem is most of these Republican voters, you know, they're low information voters. Right. He can't say that. I can. Right. I look at the data. But it's also the weirdest position to be in, which is anybody over the age of 65, I think it's like Massey's losing by 30 points.
- [43:48]
B
Yeah.
- [43:49]
A
Anybody under the age of 65, Massey's winning by 30 points. And so it shows you, like what I would call the, the new media, things like the Tom woods show, different podcasts versus Fox News.
- [44:02]
B
Yeah, right.
- [44:03]
A
It's like such a clear comparison for those that are just, you know, being inundated with Fox News. Massie's been blackballed from Fox for 18 months. He hasn't been on there. And, you know, it's actually a really fascinating argument. Like, people talk about, you know, oh, well, should there be caps in campaigns and what you can contribute? And it's like, well, do we want Fox News to decide, you know, who gets elected? And I like Fox. I'm not anti Fox, but what I'm saying is, like, those voters, that's all the information they're consuming. And so our objective is to try to penetrate that. But, yeah, I mean, I hate to say this, but the message is just proving that Massie is a strong conservative. And by the way, Trump has approval in his district of 75%. So think about how difficult that is to get when 75% of Republican voters approve of Trump and you're trying to win 50% plus one vote.
- [44:59]
B
Yeah. So here's what you do. First of all, you run an ad saying Thomas Massie supported Donald Trump through two impeachments when other Republicans ran and hid. Ran home to their mom, their mommies. When rino. You don't have to mention Lindsey Graham because he's irrelevant. He's not in the race. But Lindsey Graham wiped his hands of Trump on January 6th. Whereas we have footage of Massie grilling Merrick Garland about, hey, did you have some of your own assets there, in effect, trying to entrap People on that date. And you've got him against. You got him going up against the left on guns. Like he's saying. He's pointing to something and saying like, you don't even know what this is. That's not a bump stock. Does anybody, even anybody here know anything about guns at all? I mean, you could make a reel of him as conservative hero would be no difficulty at all. Dan Smatz will do it for you. Is that not also important?
- [45:54]
A
We love dissonant media. I don't know if you're trolling me or not, but those are pretty much all of Thomas Massie's ads. Yes, that is exactly the message that he is delivering. And I tell people, like, I'm not running the full campaign, right. As running the independent expenditure. I'm trying to fix the one problem, which is the negatives on his opponent. But yes, everything you just said are literally the barrage of Thomas Massie's TV ads and his message in the mail to the voters. Because it's spot on. Everything you said is exactly correct.
- [46:23]
B
Okay, Cliff, it would be demoralizing to say the least if some billionaire backed essentially non entity. I mean, everybody understands this man is a nonentity, which is exactly why they want him. They don't want some brilliant person with an independent mind. They want a yes man. They want a non entity. And that's what they got big time. And he refuses to debate. And it's embarrassing. I mean, I would be embarrassed to support if Massie was refusing to debate in a close race. That would be embarrassing to me. But it's. I don't have to defend the embarrassing candidate in this particular race. So it would be demoralizing if this guy who is backed by ridiculous outside money for obvious purposes, ends up winning. It would be, on the other hand, a tremendous shot in the arm to very demoralized people if he were to win. Now, obviously he's going to say, go to his campaign website and send him money, but he's not on the show right now. You are. The most urgent thing you would say we need to do to help him is, is doors win wars dot com.
- [47:29]
A
Doors win wars dot com. Every single dollar that we raise will go directly toward helping him win reelection. And Tom, look, I don't, I don't want to sensationalize anything, but if Thomas Massie, you're right, it's going to be such a jolt one way or the other. Right. If he loses the race, the entire liberty movement, I mean, you know, who do we lean on? I mean, this is kind of our guy. And if he wins against 10 to 15 million dollars from billionaires and just these special interests, because the guy actually says, hey, I want to put America first, I'm going to get excited again, right? This might be something that gets me going again, gets everybody going again, makes us have some belief that in politics there is a path forward. But yeah. Doorswinwars.com, this is the race. This is the race. And I don't want to make people scared by saying Thomas Massie could lose, but as I've said to the Tom woods show for years, I want to be honest, I want to be transparent. In the political world, you don't get that a lot. This is a single digit race. Massey wins by 10 maximum, loses by five maximum. That's where we're at. And that's why the betting markets are what they are, which is one third of the time he's going to lose. And that's the reality. So when you bring up the Kalshi and some of these predicted markets, they're not wrong. 1 out of 3 chance that Thomas Massie loses, I'd rather be us than them. We have a 2/3 chance of winning. But this is the battle for the soul of the liberty movement to give us something moving forward and everybody should get involved. Doorswinwars.com well, I hate to violate one
- [49:07]
B
of the principles of marketing and give people two things to do, but sometimes you have to. The book we've been talking about is Run right Complete Election Playbook to Win. And you can check that out, get all the background about it atrun right book.com runwrightbook.com which, and he's done it just the right way. He's got a book website, he's got bonus stuff for you.
- [49:29]
A
I learned that from you, Tom. Just to be clear, old woods set me up.
- [49:33]
B
All right, so we don't want to let old Cliff down when he follows the woods strategy. So you're going to check out run right book.com let's do we can for the great Thomas Massie. And let's also support the great Cliff Maloney who's out there doing some of the, the grunge work that is what actually gets things done. You know, it's not just that you move people philosophically. We also need to get out there and roll up our sleeves and do the kinds of work that Cliff does every single day. He is on the road vastly more often than he's at home. So, Cliff, we appreciate you. Well, let's let's put it this way. Thank you for your service.
- [50:08]
A
Cliff Maloney Tom, as always, appreciate you appreciate the entire audience. I'm a daily listener, so it's always awesome to be on here and appreciate the entire liberty movement. Let's win for Thomas.
- [50:20]
B
Thanks so much, Cliff, and thank you, ladies and gentlemen.
- [50:26]
A
Make yourself and those you love less vulnerable to the regime, both mentally and physically. Get more for Forbidden information@tomsfreebooks.com and be sure to subscribe to the show wherever you listen. See you next time.
- [50:47]
B
Like the sound of the Tom Wood show, my audio production is provided by Podsworth Media. Check them out@podsworth.com Enter code woods50 to get 50 50% off your first order. If your recording sounds rough, the Podsworth app can make it not only listenable, but professional. Remember, when you use code WOODS50, you'll get half off your first order and you'll also be supporting this show.
- [51:12]
C
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A
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