781: Watching the Watchers
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A quick warning. There are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. Okay, so we're going to start this week's show with something that's been going on behind the scenes of this year's midterm election. It's called the Precinct Strategy. This is something that's been around for a while, but it wasn't a big thing until last year when Steve Bannon, remember Steve Bannon, got a hold of the idea and started pushing it on his podcast. So Dan, the floor is yours. You're about to offer a course on personal, political empowerment. How do they do it, Dan? This right here is the video that started it all. It's from February 2021, just Steve Bannon being the Steve Bannon we've come to know. He's wearing at least three shirts. He's framed by a row of MAGA hats lined up on a mantle. And he's bringing it on this guest who is a longtime Arizona activist named Dan Schultz. Dan Schultz is here to solve a problem. Thanks, Steve. It's real simple. And most people learn this, at least I did back in the late 60s and 7th grade in social studies. So what he goes out here, the way that Schultz and Bannon see this, the reason that Donald Trump isn't president anymore, it's not just, you know, election fraud by the Democrats. That's obviously a given for them. But the real problem in 2020 was the Republicans who let them get away with it, but didn't do every last thing in their power to keep President Trump in office. What they're talking about is the mainstream Republicans in, you know, Arizona and Georgia and Michigan, people who went ahead and certified the election results for Joe Biden, accepted that Trump lost, did not stand by him in his neediest hour to prevent that from happening again. Dan Schultz and Steve Bannon won an army of MAGA enthusiasts to be in place and be ready for the coming election in just a few weeks. And they're going to do this by getting people to sign up for the lowest level positions in the Republican Party. It's a job called precinct committeemen. I've got my PC button on it, precinct committeemen. Precinct committeemen are the party. And if you want to put up graphic number four, it basically explains that there's about 400,000 of these party positions in our party nationwide. But over 200,000 of them are vacant. What we have to do is we have to take over the party and there's only one way to do it. The precinct committeemen are the party. Precinct committeemen do all kinds of political ground work. Door knocking, phone banking, leaf-witting, they often work as official poll watchers on Election Day for the party, but in addition, and this might not sound like a big deal, but it's key, they often elect officials higher up in the Republican Party, who elect the officials even higher up than that, who elect the state parties and the national party and decide where the GOP is going to spend money and what races to back. They decide the party platform.
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