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Cliff Maloney’s Grassroots Strategy and GOP’s Evolving Tactics

Published: January 25, 2025
Network: The Conservative Caucus
Analysis: Conservative Caucus President Jim Pfaff

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In a revealing conversation with The Conservative Caucus President Jim Pfaff, political strategist Cliff Maloney breaks down the grassroots strategy that helped deliver Pennsylvania’s crucial 19 electoral votes to Donald Trump in 2024. As CEO of Citizens Alliance and founder of Pennsylvania Chase, Maloney’s operation knocked on over 510,000 doors and increased Republican mail-in ballot participation from 20% to 34.5%—a shift that political operatives are calling a game-changer for conservative electoral success. The discussion offers an insider’s look at how Republicans finally matched Democrats’ ground game infrastructure and what it means for future elections.

Topics Covered

• From Math Teacher to Political Strategist: Cliff Maloney’s Background
• The Grassroots Strategy Behind Pennsylvania Chase
• Why Republicans Finally Embraced Ballot Chasing
• The Numbers: Pennsylvania’s Electoral Transformation
• Down-Ballot Victories and Congressional Wins
• 2026 and Beyond: Building Permanent Infrastructure
• The Coming Battle: Doge vs. The Swamp
• Key Takeaways

From Math Teacher to Political Strategist: Cliff Maloney’s Background

Cliff Maloney’s journey into political strategy began far from the campaign trail. Originally studying to become a math teacher in Pennsylvania, Maloney got involved working for Ron Paul’s presidential campaign and later his Senate reelection in 2016. It was during this experience that he had what he calls an “epiphany moment” about Republican electoral infrastructure.

“In the general election, you had Republicans with robust volunteer operations knocking doors, making calls. Then you had Democrats with both robust volunteer and paid efforts when it came to a ground game,” Maloney explained. “I kept thinking to myself, why don’t Republicans have this? Why aren’t Republicans competing in this paid space of building a real infrastructure?”

This realization set Maloney on a path that would eventually lead to his work with Young Americans for Liberty and the founding of Citizens Alliance, which has now knocked over eight million doors across four states—Pennsylvania, Idaho, North Dakota, and New Hampshire—helping win over 400 state legislative races.

The Grassroots Strategy Behind Pennsylvania Chase

The Pennsylvania Chase operation didn’t emerge in a vacuum. It was born from hard lessons learned in the 2022 midterms, when Republican candidates in R+10 districts nearly lost because Democrats had superior ground game operations. Pennsylvania’s election laws allow for 50 days of mail-in voting—not 15, but 50—and Republicans were essentially sitting out for 49 of those days.

“We were just saying to everybody, ‘Hey, vote on Election Day. There’s no strategy, there’s no plan, but we’re just going to turn out and we’ll beat them and overwhelm them on Election Day,'” Maloney recounted. “I was just kind of putting my head against the wall saying, what are we going to do about this?”

The grassroots strategy was built on a simple but powerful premise: identify Trump supporters who weren’t consistent Trump voters, get them to request mail-in ballots, and then chase those ballots relentlessly until they were returned. This wasn’t about persuasion—it was about turnout optimization.

“This is going to a Trump voter’s door—excuse me, a Trump supporter’s door—saying, ‘Hey Bob, you got a ballot sitting on your dining room table. I need you to send that back. If you send it back, we’ll never talk to you again.’ The Democrats call this the power of annoying the voter.”
— Cliff Maloney, CEO, Citizens Alliance

Why Republicans Finally Embraced Ballot Chasing

For years, Republican voters and operatives resisted early voting and mail-in ballots, viewing them as less secure than in-person Election Day voting. This cultural resistance cost Republicans dearly, particularly in states with expanded early voting windows. The evolution toward accepting these methods represents a significant strategic shift.

Jim Pfaff, who has been running campaigns since 1992, provided crucial context about early voting’s effectiveness. He recalled working on Colorado’s marriage amendment in 2006, when the state had just expanded early voting to 20 days. Despite 2006 being a terrible year for Republicans nationally, the amendment passed with 60% of the vote because of a disciplined grassroots strategy that utilized every voting method available under law.

“Republicans have not taken advantage of the opportunities of what the law tells them they can do,” Pfaff observed. “This is a mindset change that I think finally happened this year.”

Maloney traced the Republican evolution through recent election cycles. In 2020, Republicans insisted on Election Day voting. In 2021, they hoped courts would fix election laws. In 2022, they looked to legislatures. By 2023, after getting “punched in the mouth” in the midterms, Republicans finally had their reckoning moment.

“We all stood up, we looked in the mirror and said, ‘Okay, time to regroup. We got to rethink this. What are we going to do?'” Maloney explained. “A lot of us came to terms with this: Are we just going to concede the election because we don’t like the rules, or are we going to adapt and play by them?”

Three key factors enabled this shift. First, Trump campaign leadership—Susie Wiles, Chris LaCivita, and James Blair—made competing in early voting a strategic priority. Second, Charlie Kirk’s winter meeting in Las Vegas trained GOP officials from the grassroots up on ballot-chasing tactics. Third, and most importantly, Trump himself publicly endorsed voting by whatever method was available.

The Numbers: Pennsylvania’s Electoral Transformation

The Pennsylvania Chase operation set an ambitious public goal: increase Republican mail-in ballot participation from the typical 20% to 33%. The actual results exceeded expectations.

Pennsylvania Chase deployed 120 full-time ballot chasers who knocked on 510,000 doors between September 1 and Election Day. The operation didn’t just hit random addresses—it used sophisticated targeting to identify Republicans who had requested mail-in ballots in 2020 but never returned them. That number was staggering: 141,000 Republicans had ballots sitting on their dining room tables that were never cast.

“These Republicans have a ballot sitting on their table and nobody ever talked to them,” Maloney noted. “Nobody targeted them with that specific message that you have a ballot.”

The results speak for themselves. Trump won Pennsylvania by just under two percentage points, receiving 34.5% of the mail-in vote—significantly higher than the historical 20% and even exceeding the 33% goal. While Democrats still won the mail-in vote overall, their margin was dramatically reduced compared to 2020.

Down-Ballot Victories and Congressional Wins

While the presidential race garnered headlines, the Pennsylvania Chase grassroots strategy delivered crucial down-ballot victories that will shape governance for years to come. Because the operation targeted Republican turnout broadly, every statewide candidate benefited from the 510,000 doors knocked.

Republicans won every statewide race in Pennsylvania, including treasurer, auditor general, and attorney general—positions that often serve as bellwethers for base turnout. These races are particularly telling because they receive minimal advertising and debate coverage, making them reliable indicators of actual voter mobilization.

The congressional results were even more impressive. Pennsylvania Chase specifically targeted three congressional districts: PA-7, PA-8, and PA-10. PA-10 was a defensive hold for incumbent Scott Perry, a Freedom Caucus member who faced significant opposition not just from Democrats but from establishment Republicans who were reluctant to fund his race.

“Scott Perry had tons of money spent against him… We put three of our 10 Airbnb houses that housed all of our ballot chasers in Scott’s district. We even did a program at the end called the PA’s final sprint where we brought in an additional 100 volunteers just for the final two weeks.”
— Cliff Maloney

Perry won by less than a point, but he won. More significantly, Republicans flipped PA-7 and PA-8 from Democratic control—seats that Democrats had taken for granted and didn’t adequately defend against the grassroots onslaught.

Perhaps the most significant down-ballot victory was Dave McCormick’s Senate win over longtime incumbent Bob Casey. McCormick won by less than 20,000 votes in a race that virtually no one predicted Republicans would win. Casey, from a prominent Pennsylvania political family, was considered nearly unbeatable just months before the election.

“If you would have told me a year ago that Bob Casey was beating, I probably would have said you need to have your head examined,” Pfaff admitted. “Your efforts probably won that, in my opinion.”

Maloney credited McCormick’s campaign for running “one of the best statewide races I’ve ever seen,” with hard-hitting, authentic advertising. But the grassroots infrastructure provided the margin of victory in a race where every vote mattered.

2026 and Beyond: Building Permanent Infrastructure

Victory in 2024 was significant, but Maloney and Pfaff both emphasized that winning one election doesn’t build lasting political power. The challenge now is converting a successful grassroots strategy into permanent infrastructure that can compete in every election cycle.

Citizens Alliance operates what Maloney calls “The Liberty State Project” in four states: Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, North Dakota, and Idaho. The organization focuses exclusively on state legislative races, working to elect what Maloney describes as “hardcore America First real conservatives” to represent the Republican Party.

“We’re not afraid to go after RINOs in primaries,” Maloney stated plainly. “We’ve taken out five incumbents in Pennsylvania out of the six that we’ve targeted the last two cycles. It’s not cheap—we spent over $2 million to do that.”

This approach draws criticism from those who argue Republicans should focus their resources on defeating Democrats rather than challenging incumbent Republicans. Maloney’s response is unequivocal: when Democrats run as Republicans, they must be challenged.

For 2025, Pennsylvania Chase is eyeing 9,000 judge of election races across Pennsylvania precincts, along with school board races, county executives, and mayoral contests. These local races rarely attract national attention but control the mechanics of election administration and local policy implementation.

Looking ahead to 2026, the state house remains a key target. Republicans lost control in 2022 and failed to flip it back in 2024, falling short by a single seat. Maloney noted that one targeted district they lost was because “the candidate refused to sign our pledge”—a reminder that ideological alignment matters as much as party label.

Pfaff emphasized the importance of this state-level focus, drawing on decades of campaign experience: “You can only do it by getting the right players, not just the red players, but the right red players in there that are willing to take the right steps.”

The Coming Battle: Doge vs. The Swamp

Both Maloney and Pfaff identified the implementation of government efficiency reforms—spearheaded by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative—as the defining battle that will determine whether 2026 is a good or disastrous year for Republicans.

“The number one battle in terms of the future of the Republic is going to be what I call the Doge versus the swamp,” Maloney predicted. “Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and Ron Paul—they’re going to go to Donald Trump and say, ‘Listen, here are the reforms you need. We got to cut these thousands of regulations, we got to get rid of these three to five departments, we got to cut spending across the board by 5, 10, 15 percent.'”

The swamp’s response is predictable: calls for incremental change, warnings about radical disruption, and accusations of extremism. The real question is whether Senate Majority Leader John Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson will side with reform or preservation of the status quo.

“John Thune and Mike Johnson have one of the greatest opportunities to have a personal legacy as the best Speaker of the House and the best Majority Leader in American history, because you have such a pivotal time with a mandate from the American people: we want radical reform, we want to drain the swamp.”
— Cliff Maloney

Maloney outlined two scenarios for 2026. If Trump’s first 100 days deliver significant reforms that Americans can see and feel by late 2025, Republicans could have “a very good midterm.” But if establishment forces stonewall DOGE, drag out implementation, and the economy remains sluggish, “2026 is horrible and it puts us in a bad position for ’28.”

Pfaff added a critical observation about congressional accountability: even well-intentioned leadership can be dragged down by rank-and-file members who resist reform. The grassroots pressure that worked in the 2024 election must be sustained and directed at individual members of Congress.

One advantage Republicans now have is the real-time nature of alternative media. As Maloney noted, “It’s no longer the Senate Majority Leader comes out for a press conference and then two weeks later there’s an update. It is in real time: ‘Joni Ernst, where do you stand on this nomination? We need an answer. Oh, you don’t want to give us an answer? Up the pressure.’ Twelve hours later, we’ve got an answer.”

This dynamic creates unprecedented accountability mechanisms that didn’t exist even a decade ago. Podcasts, social media, and direct-to-consumer news mean voters can track their representatives’ positions and apply pressure before votes happen, not after.

Key Takeaways

1. Grassroots Infrastructure Matters More Than Money – Pennsylvania Chase knocked 510,000 doors with 120 paid canvassers and increased Republican mail-in participation by 14.5 percentage points, proving that targeted door-to-door contact delivers results that advertising alone cannot match.
2. Republicans Must Compete on Every Front – For years, Republicans ceded early voting and mail-in ballots to Democrats based on security concerns. The 2024 cycle proved that competing within existing election laws—rather than sitting out—is essential for victory in purple states.
3. State Legislative Races Are the Foundation – Citizens Alliance’s focus on state house and senate races creates the bench for future congressional leaders while controlling election administration, education policy, and regulatory frameworks that affect daily life more than federal legislation.
4. Down-Ballot Targeting Amplifies Presidential Efforts – By strategically placing resources in congressional districts like Scott Perry’s PA-10, grassroots operations can defend embattled conservatives and flip competitive seats while simultaneously boosting presidential turnout.
5. Primary Challenges to RINOs Are Necessary – Taking out five of six targeted incumbent Republicans in Pennsylvania primaries cost $2 million but ensured that the Republican label represents actual conservative governance rather than establishment accommodation.
6. The DOGE Battle Will Define 2026 – Whether Elon Musk’s government efficiency reforms are implemented or stonewalled by establishment Republicans in the first 100 days of Trump’s second term will determine whether 2026 is a successful midterm or a disaster for conservatives.
7. Permanent Infrastructure Requires Year-Round Operations – The 2025 focus on school board races, judge of election positions, and local offices builds the foundation for 2026 and 2028 success—elections are won in off-years, not just presidential cycles.
8. Alternative Media Creates Real-Time Accountability – Podcasts, social media, and direct communication channels mean elected officials can no longer hide behind press conferences and delayed responses—grassroots pressure can force answers in hours, not weeks.

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About The Conservative Caucus:
The Conservative Caucus is a grassroots public policy action organization, formed in 1974. Headed by President Jim Pfaff, the Caucus is committed to advancing free enterprise, limited government, and traditional values.

Originally broadcast January 25, 2025 on The Conservative Caucus.