On a Rumble show, True the Vote’s Gregg Phillips describes his new PAC, its “sophisticated data system,” and the “fun election integrity-related things” it's going to do
Published
On September 16, Gregg Phillips — a leader of election denial organization True the Vote — appeared on Chad Nedohin's pro-Trump Rumble show. Ahead of the 2024 election, True the Vote has claimed it “is reaching out to sheriffs across the country” to monitor ballot drop boxes and has launched a new app for users “to quickly report problems at the polls" and “document and report instances of suspected election fraud.”
As Media Matters previously explained:
True the Vote was founded in 2009 — following the election of former President Barack Obama — by then-tea party activist Catherine Engelbrecht with the goal of pushing for voter ID laws and purging voter rolls. Engelbrecht, whom “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander has called “the godmother of the election integrity movement,” and her business partner, Gregg Phillips, a Republican operative and former Mississippi official, have repeatedly pushed false election-related claims since at least 2016. Phillips claimed without evidence that millions of illegal votes had been cast in the 2016 presidential election, and both Engelbrecht and Phillips were listed as executive producers for and starred in 2000 Mules, a widely debunked 2022 film that claims to show evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
You can read more about how True the Vote has cultivated relationships with supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory here.
Citation From the September 16, 2024, edition of DWAC'D LIVE!, streamed on Rumble
GREGG PHILLIPS: Catherine [Engelbrecht] and I have been really called to do what we have talked about now for five or six months, and that’s start a PAC. I’ve been involved in politics, as most of you know for 40, 45 years or so. And, along the way, I’ve run some of the biggest PACs in the world. I ran [Newt Gingrich's] super PAC back in 2012, which was a really huge one.
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And since then, as you know, I mean, with Catherine’s stuff on the True the Vote nonprofit side, and then we’ve got a couple for-profits, and then we’ve got [501(c)(4)s] and all these different things.
But super PACs were really made to slug the bad guys in the mouth. And that’s exactly what we intend to do. For those of you that, you know, might be upset by that — metaphorically speaking, of course. We're not actually going to go slug — not right this minute any way.
But we are really excited about the opportunities that are presented to us. We’ve — I was sharing with Chad earlier that we’ve got a set of numbers that are about — there’s about 11 million voters that fall into a couple of categories that we’ve been able to define and not just define them, but be able to communicate with them with a message that means — that is meaningful to them in their current circumstance.
So we go in and we do all the analytics. We come up with all these numbers and then we can send them email, we can send them text. But what we can also do is target messaging to their phones, and through, you know, their search engines and all the other ways that we have to be able to do these things.
It is the single most effective set of tools that I’ve ever had at my disposal in all of my life. And now what we’re doing is we’ve kind of skinnied this thing down where we’ve got it to where we only have to spend a couple dollars per voter, and be able to move the needle in a way that is so powerful and so meaningful and really and truly start flipping those tables and walk — walking in.
And we’re not going to take anything from anybody. This is a pro-faith, this is a pro-freedom, this is a pro-liberty PAC. We’re going to support not just candidates upballot, but we’re going to support people downballot. We’ve got 21 congressional districts that we’re focused on, that are going to make a difference. And I don’t have much doubt that President Trump’s going to win. I don’t have any doubt we’re going to win the Senate. But there is some doubt on what sort of margins we’re gonna have on the House side. So it’s really important for us to do that.
We’ve also created something called community data grants. And what those are — we’re going into small community races that are like school boards and county commissioners and all of those things that roll uphill. So those people are way more likely to call their neighbors, go knock on their door, send a text to their friends, than, say, a presidential race or a Senate race or something like that.
But rather than going in and saying, “Hey, we need $1,000 from you, and we’ll give you all this data.” We’re going to fund it all through the PAC, and then we’re just gonna give the data away. And so, they’ll have to show it as an in-kind contribution.
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As money comes in, we’re just going to turn around and crank it right back out. We’re going to do direct communication. We’ve got some really fun election integrity-related things that we’re going to do. And, as I said, we’re just going to start flipping the tables. I mean, if they want to, you know, sue us or do whatever they want to do to us, it doesn’t really matter. We’re just going to keep fighting back. We’re going to keep contacting voters, and we’re going to get them out to start pushing around.
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Well, we certainly are using the Ground Fusion data. We are using the analytics for Ground Fusion. So we have 211 million voting records. We have three to five hundred data elements for every single person. We have cell phones. We have email addresses. We have IMEI codes so that we can send them direct messages through ad keys. And we will absolutely be using that. But we’ve got some other tricks up our sleeve in terms of our ability to to reach out to folks, and have, I think, probably done the best job of microtargeting across the United States of any group in America. We’ve got it tagged all the way down to certain neighborhoods, to precincts.
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We're doing a thing called — we're going to call — temporarily, it's called 47 Votes. It's sort of a personal get-out-the-vote plan that the PAC's going to be sponsoring.
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We’ve got a supercool app that we’re going to be releasing here in the next few weeks. And, it’s just — man, it’s just it’s such a great time to be in this space. I was telling Chad before we started that I’ve just never — I can’t remember having more fun.
And I think that the fun is really centered around our ability to work with, you know, folks like y’all and others that have good ideas. And while they may not have the data to support it, they’ve got a really cool idea for an app. So we partner up. We build up an app. We push it out the door in a couple of weeks. It’s supported by the most sophisticated data system in the history of the United States, or really in the history of politics. And we’re going to move the needle, and it’s going to be very, very painful to the other side because there’s nothing they can do about it. They can’t stop us. They can’t do anything.