The Pennsylvania Chase Is On: An Interview With Cliff Maloney

The race is on. That would be the race to carry Pennsylvania for former President Donald Trump, win a key Senate race, and win the rest of the down ballot races. And the Citizens Alliance in Pennsylvania (CAP) is on the case.

CAP founder, businessman, and former state legislator John Kennedy has brought in well-known “door knocking guru” Cliff Maloney to carry the flag for Trump supporters, and it’s safe to say Maloney is decidedly at work.

I sat down with Maloney this week and talked about what has become known as “The Pennsylvania Chase.”

Maloney began by describing the problem at hand.

Pennsylvania’s COVID laws “changed the Pennsylvania election rules to 50 days of no-excuse mail-in ballots,” he said. That, in turn, has led to “Republicans averaging only 20 percent of mail-in ballots.” Here are the stats:

• 2020 Mail-In Ballots
  • Democrat: 1,995, 691 / 77 percent
  • Republican: 595, 538/23 percent
• 2022 Mail-In Ballots
  • Democrat: 960,405 / 80 percent
  • Republican 234,371 / 20 percent

Maloney provides the solution to this decidedly serious problem.

• “The Pennsylvania Chase will knock on 500,000 doors to chase GOP ballots.”
• “To win in Pennsylvania in 2024 Republicans must receive 33 percent of all mail in ballots.”

“How do we use the Left’s tactics of using grass roots tactics, of going door-to-door?” That is the question Maloney kept coming back to as time has moved on from the last couple of election cycles.

His has been a national effort. But Pennsylvania is his home state — he hails from Delaware County, one of the Big Four suburban counties that ring Democratic Philadelphia. His “Chase” colleagues are all Pennsylvanians as well. Maloney is a former math teacher who worked on Sen. Rand Paul’s presidential campaign.

In his role as the national “door knocking guru,” Maloney has scored 300 election wins, created 2,000 jobs, and had 6 million doors knocked. Eventually he crossed paths with and linked up with Kennedy, who is the driving force behind the Citizens Alliance. Kennedy and CAP have been discussed in this space before. (READ THE PIECE: Pennsylvania’s Capitalist Revolt)

Now Kennedy and Maloney have joined forces with a laser-style focus on carrying Pennsylvania in 2024 for Trump and the GOP. “In 2020 they changed the rules” in Pennsylvania, Maloney says.

Maloney says that in 2021, Republicans more or less complained about what was done. “They cheated” was the sentiment among Pennsylvania Republicans (not to mention with the former president himself).

In 2022, the sentiment was “we need to litigate.” That in turn led to the belief that “we need to fix this.” Maloney notes that with mail-in votes alone, the U.S. Senate race came down to 20 percent for the GOP’s Dr. Mehmet Oz, with 80 percent for Democrat John Fetterman. Mulroney notes the obvious: “There’s no way to win an election when you are down by 60 percent.”

What to do? Maloney says he got a call from Charlie Kirk’s team. Kirk, of course, is the head of Turning Point USA.

The concern was that both the national and state GOP had “not stepped up.” Maloney is quick to not cast blame on either but to note instead how the rules had been changed. When dividing up the various states with Kirk’s group, it was decided that Maloney would partner Pennsylvania Chase with Kennedy’s Citizen Alliance for 2024.

The first task: From Jan. 1 to Sept. 1, get those “low propensity voters” to request a mail-in ballot. Then, from Sept. 1 to the election, knock on doors to get voters to cast their ballots.

“Charlie’s team has been great,” Maloney says. He notes the Pennsylvania races involved — Trump’s White House run and the hot U.S. Senate race with the GOP’s Dave McCormick versus Democrat Sen. Bob Casey Jr. — and also emphasizes the race with my own Rep. Scott Perry, a decided Democrat target.

“I couldn’t believe this at first, but there’s roughly a million Republican voters” in the state who have only voted “two or fewer times,” Maloney says.

One of the first steps, of course, is to create an app — in this case, “The Pennsylvania Chase.” It is filled with the details of the task ahead,

The goal: to get the GOP share of mail-in ballots from 20 percent to 33 percent. And the starting point: “Knocking on 120 doors a day.”

There was more, but the basics were clear. The fight is already on to carry Pennsylvania for the GOP in 2024.

It has been done before. And Kennedy and Maloney believe it can be done again. They will be hiring ballot chasers and paying them. Not to mention, they’ll be tending to the always required basics — training, housing, supplies, and more. They are on the job.

All of which is to say, the Pennsylvania Chase is on.

Stay tuned.