The Plan to Boost GOP Primary Turnout

Presidential candidates converged again this month on the Iowa State Fair to flip sizzling pork chops, nibble peculiar speared foods, and scout for undecided caucus-goers. Yet history suggests most Iowans, and even most Republicans, are more into the fair rides and butter sculptures than primary politics. In the November 2016 election, Iowa’s 2.4 million adults cast 1.6 million votes, 801,000 for Donald Trump. How many Iowans were counted in that year’s GOP caucus? Only 187,000.

Is this part of what’s driving politics haywire? Millions of Americans vote in general elections but sit out primaries, ceding candidate selection to the most polarized fraction of a fraction, which is one reason the political world now knows the parallel initials AOC and MTG. For 2024 the two big parties seem intent on a grudge match, President Biden vs. President Trump, which sounds to many voters like a sadistic choice in a game of “would you rather.” Biden or Trump? Eat a bowl of grasshoppers or drink a vase of stagnant flower water?

Primary politics has a centrifugal effect down the ballot as well. “Over the past couple of election cycles, we’ve seen Republicans nominating really bad candidates, and they’ve been advocating for things that violate the core American principles that so many of our countrymen hold dear,” says Emily Seidel, the chief executive of Americans for Prosperity, or AFP. “That opened the door to the left, moving further and further to the left, in terms of proposing public policies that also violate core American principles.”

She doesn’t name names, but recent news reports suggest Kari Lake is preparing to run for Senate in Arizona next year, after she botched last year’s gubernatorial race by making herself synonymous with stolen-election nonsense, while simultaneously insulting Republican voters who liked their old political warhorse John McCain. Whatever his conservative heresies, McCain spent decades winning Arizona for the GOP, and losers don’t drain any swamps.

“If we want to have better leaders in office, we need better candidates in the first place,” Ms. Seidel says. AFP, a conservative advocacy group founded in 2004 by Charles and David Koch, is now playing in a presidential primary for the first time. To quote an ad from AFP Action, an associated super PAC: “If we nominate Trump, Republicans lose.” Canvassers are knocking on the doors of “soft” Trump voters, and according to a polling memo posted by AFP, “41% of Trump supporters say they are open to supporting an alternative.”

One way to win an election is to whack the other guy and steal his followers, and political candidates typically do plenty of that. But another approach is to change the electorate by inviting more voters into the pool. AFP thinks its permanent infrastructure might give it an advantage there. The group has about 450 full-time staff, 1,000 part-time canvassers, and an ambitious goal: to boost primary turnout by 10% to 15% in targeted states. If that sounds implausible, see AFP Action’s latest fundraising report, noting $76 million raised in the first six months of 2023.

Typical turnout varies widely. In 2016, the last time Republicans had an open presidential race, Nevada’s GOP caucus drew 75,000 votes. Nine months later, 1.1 million Nevadans voted in the general election, almost half for Mr. Trump. Primaries tend to do better, but Arizona’s Republican contest in 2016 had 624,000 votes, compared with 2.6 million in November, half for Mr. Trump.

AFP’s idea is that plenty of Republicans might be receptive to the message that if they want to win in 2024, they should help nominate candidates who can close the deal. If they don’t believe that’s Mr. Trump, they’re also unlikely to be fans of Ms. Lake or the GOP’s other human self-destruct sequences. Some of these voters probably skip primaries not because they don’t care, but because it hasn’t been a priority. Work, church and Little League come first.

“These are not apathetic people,” says Michael Palmer, president of i360, a data group working with AFP. “They have voted. They just don’t vote in these types of primaries.” Maybe what they need is a nudge or two or six. “We’re going to bug them to go and turn out,” Mr. Palmer says. “We’re going to knock on their door a bunch of times. We’re going to send them mail. They’re going to get sick of their Facebook

He says i360’s files include information on 223 million registered voters, “with hundreds and hundreds of data points on each, obviously political data points, partisanship, vote history, but then also a lot on the consumer side in terms of purchase preference, demographics, lifestyle.” The algorithms say AFP’s target voters, compared with the usual primary electorate, are 10% more likely to have attended college, 12% to be middle-aged, 13% to like classical music, and 16% to watch pro sports.

That’s when the army of canvassers comes in. “The most effective way to have an engagement with an individual,” Ms. Seidel says, “is to do so face-to-face.” Second best is a one-on-one phone conversation, and “those are the two things that we can do at scale.” So far in the 2024 cycle, AFP says it has done 2.6 million door knocks and phone calls.

Political pollsters screen for likely primary voters, so if thousands of unlikely voters turn up, it could scramble the predictions. Ms. Lake won the Arizona GOP’s primary nod last time by 5 points. As for Mr. Trump, a 10% or 15% turnout bump won’t matter if he’s still leading with half the vote come 2024. But prodding more median Republicans to have their say might make some difference if Mr. Trump fades.

“The way we’ve been looking at it this whole time is that the most likely outcome is that President Biden and former President Trump are the nominees,” Ms. Seidel says. “In that situation, Biden wins. And what we know is that Americans can’t afford four more years of spending-fueled inflation, and an administrative state that’s on steroids, and on and on.”

Participating in the Iowa caucus in the January cold isn’t as much fun as sitting on a Ferris wheel in the summer with a deep-fried Twinkie on a stick. But if AFP is right, the results in 2024 might depend on how many of those fairgoers, and similar regular folks in other states, decide to put primary day on the calendar.

Mr. Peterson is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.