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The Heritage Action Scorecard and the Save America Act: Jim Pfaff with Dan West at the RNC Midterm Convention | Sep 10, 2026

Published: September 10, 2026
Network: TCC Live — RNC Midterm Convention coverage, Dallas
Analysis: Conservative Caucus President Jim Pfaff

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On September 10, 2026, on day two of TCC’s live coverage of the RNC Midterm Convention in Dallas, Conservative Caucus President Jim Pfaff brought Dan West to the booth. West is the government relations lead for the U.S. House at Heritage Action, and the two of them came to talk about the Save America Act and about the tool Heritage Action has used since its early days to make members of Congress answer for their votes: the Heritage Action scorecard. Pfaff has history with both. He was chief of staff to Congressman Tim Huelskamp when Mike Needham was running Heritage Action, and he was the staffer who put together the private member meetings — several of them at Needham’s house — that eventually emerged as the House Freedom Caucus. What followed was a working conversation about why a bill that polls at 80% is still sitting in the Senate, what the Senate rules actually say, and who is supposed to run an American election.

Topics Covered

• The Heritage Action Scorecard and the Whole Record
• Not Making the Grade: Mike Johnson and the Bill McConnell Could Not Stop
• From the RNC Midterm Convention to a Heart of Action in Washington
• An 80% Bill and the 60-Vote Story
• Citizenship and Voter ID: The Two Prongs
• Citizens Run Elections. Officials Certify Them.
• Key Takeaways

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The Heritage Action Scorecard and the Whole Record

Pfaff opened by telling viewers to follow the Heritage Action scorecard, and West explained what it is built to measure. It is not a party-loyalty index.

“We still use the Heritage Action scorecard, which has been since the early days one of the best ways of moving that needle, of trying to make sure that we’re holding people accountable. Not just, are you voting with the party, but are you actually upholding the conservative values that you told your constituents that you’re going to run for, and that you’re going to uphold.”
— Dan West, Government Relations Lead for the U.S. House, Heritage Action

The design solves a specific problem West named: a member takes a vote in May of one year and counts on the fact that by next year everyone will have forgotten it. On things that are actually important, he said, members need to be held accountable so that votes do not simply fall into the news cycle and out of it. Heritage Action scores the whole record, not the moment.

That is also where Pfaff’s assessment of the current Congress starts. Heritage Action has had some wins, he said, but they have not been fully successful at getting Republicans to do Republican things on Capitol Hill, and the effort is still emerging and going forward.

Not Making the Grade: Mike Johnson and the Bill McConnell Could Not Stop

Asked how Republicans are grading out by the standard the Heritage Action scorecard applies, Pfaff did not soften it.

“Listen, right now, from my now outside perspective on Capitol Hill, quite frankly, we’re not making the grade.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

He rates Speaker Mike Johnson as an upgrade from John Boehner and Paul Ryan, but still incredibly weak and in some ways challenged. Then he made the exception, and it is the whole reason West was at the booth. Mitch McConnell, he said, was kiboshing the SAVE Act in his committee for all of 2025. The House got around him with a procedural move most people never see: take a bill that already came over from the Senate, strip out the language, put new language in, and send it back.

“The Save America Act is actually much better language than the SAVE Act was, and they sent it back, and Mitch McConnell has no control over it anymore because the bill already went through committee.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

Pfaff credits Johnson for that piece of legislating and says he thinks Chip Roy helped talk him into it. It is the one praise he had, and he kept it narrow: I want to give Mike Johnson credit for that, but that’s about it, maybe — there is a lot more that needs to be done. West offered the counterweight. Leadership is working with some of the thinnest majorities anyone has ever seen in the U.S. House, and they have muscled out some wins. That is a good thing, he said, and the movement should still want more, because complacency is the failure mode.

From the RNC Midterm Convention to a Heart of Action in Washington

West’s argument for why the convention matters to a whip count is that the bill is not only a bill. The grassroots filling the hall in Dallas came for the thing the bill is named after.

“Save America isn’t just a bill, like it is actually a mission that we are on. And I think that’s why it’s resonating so much.”
— Dan West, Government Relations Lead for the U.S. House, Heritage Action

He liked seeing so many members at the convention — the same members the Heritage Action scorecard tracks vote by vote — where they regroup with the folks who put them in office and find out that this is more than a slogan. The calendar is the pressure. Members have one more week in Washington after they come back from Dallas, and West’s hope was that they return with a heart of action. TCC has been covering that same stretch of the calendar all week in our coverage of the RNC Midterm Convention in Dallas.

Pfaff had a specific ask for the Dallas stage that night: he wanted JD Vance to announce that he will use the powers of the Senate president to make the Save America Act happen. He had heard rumors about it, said he did not know whether Vance would do it, and said that is what needs to be done.

An 80% Bill and the 60-Vote Story

Pfaff’s criticism of the Senate majority leader was the sharpest thing he said all segment, and he flagged it as his own opinion: he thinks John Thune is trying to lose the Senate. The reason he finds the stall inexplicable is the polling.

“The Save America Act consistently polls 80% support, or roughly thereabouts, with similarly high support even amongst Democrats and definitely amongst independents.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

It is the one time America totally supports something and politicians are not running to get behind it, he said — the most breathtaking thing he has ever heard. West went further, saying he thinks the president had it right: not just an 80/20 issue, a 90/10 or 99/1 issue when you really get down to it, because the question underneath it is whether people can trust their institutions at all. Then Pfaff named what he says is standing in the way.

“John Thune’s lying. He says you have to have 60 votes to do anything in the Senate. The Senate rules don’t work that way.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

He does not claim it is easy. It takes a lot of work and weeks and weeks of debate. But the rule that governs every bill reaching the floor is the same one, and he walked through it. TCC has made this case before in our earlier analysis of the Save America Act fight, and the mechanics have not changed.

“Every senator gets to speak twice. They are not limited in the amount of time that they can speak. And once they have exercised their two times to speak, it’s a majority vote. That’s literally what the rules are in the Senate.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

West said Heritage Action has talked to folks who recognize that this is a matter of effort and that it could be done. What stops it, he thinks, is a fear that if leadership cannot get everything into a bill to build consensus, the conservative grassroots will not be with them. Heritage Action has been telling them the opposite from day one.

“The grassroots will be with them if they just fight and actually bring the fight to the floor. And we’re so in a place where they want precooked outcomes, and we can’t be living in that. We actually have to take risks.”
— Dan West, Government Relations Lead for the U.S. House, Heritage Action

Pfaff has been arguing the same thing for a long period of time: even if they lose the vote, if they had the fight, he thinks the American people will come on board. What voters are not going to be bought with, he added, is a $5,000 check. He loves the president, he said, but that is not going to do it.

Citizenship and Voter ID: The Two Prongs

Asked to explain the bill itself, West described a two-prong process. The first prong is making sure that only citizens are voting in American elections, which he tied directly to Biden’s border crisis and the flood of illegal immigrants into the country — that cannot be allowed to overwhelm elections, and the rights and duties of citizenship are a central American value worth upholding. The second prong is voter ID: whatever the mode or medium of voting, the person turning in a vote has to be the person they say they are.

“One person, one vote — and making sure that that person who shows up to vote is the person who they say they are. And I think that’s obviously common sense.”
— Dan West, Government Relations Lead for the U.S. House, Heritage Action

Pfaff’s case for the bill is historical rather than technical, and it is the point he says he makes constantly. The country ran elections for 230 years that were a lot different from what it has now, and they were good — not perfect, and there have been stories, but far more perfect than what exists now, and you could have confidence even with the imperfections.

Why was that? Same-day voting. Paper ballots, or mechanical lever machines — the phrase “pull your lever” comes from the machines Pfaff used when he was a kid running elections, and you cannot hack into one. The only way to rig it is to open it up and break it. Results were counted roughly the same day, at worst running to 4 a.m. if there were disputed ballots to deal with. And no electioneering, which mail balloting allows.

“The Save America Act takes us back to that, as opposed to elections that are run by mail, where the basic principles of elections — custody, immediate verifiability with potential to challenge what’s going on and to adjudicate all that process at the same day.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

Citizens Run Elections. Officials Certify Them.

Pfaff pressed West on one more principle he wants Heritage Action promoting. American elections have never been run by election authorities, he said, and there is no authorization for election authorities to run an election on Election Day. Citizens have always run them. The job of a county clerk or a secretary of state is to take in validated results gathered and processed by citizens and certify their accuracy.

“The only role of an election official is to certify accuracy, not actually to run elections.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

That is also where he grounds the bill constitutionally. Article 1 gives Congress the authority to regulate elections, and there are not many places where a regulation is laid out as an explicit authority in the Constitution. This is one of them, which is why Pfaff says the Save America Act is constitutional: states set the rules, Congress may regulate the process, and citizens run the election. Measured against that, when in Michigan in 2020 they kicked out the Republicans and put boards on the windows, that was a violation of the law that has never been adjudicated. In California, he said, citizens do not even run elections anymore — by law it is entirely the election officials.

West answered with the principle underneath it: subsidiarity, the question of where authority best lies. Too often people want to federalize an issue that is better handled at the local or state level, and doing it that way makes the process more convoluted than it ever needs to be. When Democrats were last in power they wanted to nationalize elections outright — a federal apparatus that would decide who is a citizen, who can vote, and what gets thrown out. And who would run elections then? Bureaucrats. The administrative state.

“We want a future in which the people have elections in their own hands and actually can trust the results in that way and restore trust in government along the way.”
— Dan West, Government Relations Lead for the U.S. House, Heritage Action

Closing out, West called the Save America Act one of the most important bills conservatives need to be pushing, pointed people to heritageaction.com and to heritage_action on social media, and described Heritage Action’s inside-outside game: talking to congressional staff and members in Washington about why the bill matters there, while giving a voice to a grassroots that at times feels left behind by Washington. The Heritage Action scorecard is the record that outlasts the week, and the whip count on the Save America Act is what it will grade next. Pfaff’s closing line set the stake on the calendar — election wins that are beneficial for America on November 2nd, because go the other way and he thinks the country is in real risk.

Key Takeaways

1. The Heritage Action scorecard grades the whole record – Not whether a member voted with the party, but whether the member upheld the conservative values he told his constituents he would, so that important votes do not disappear with the news cycle.
2. Pfaff’s grade for Republicans on Capitol Hill: not making the grade – He rates Mike Johnson an upgrade from Boehner and Ryan but still incredibly weak, with one exception worth praising.
3. The House got the bill past Mitch McConnell – Pfaff says McConnell kiboshed the SAVE Act in his committee for all of 2025. The House stripped a Senate-passed bill, inserted better language, and sent it back, and because it had already cleared committee he no longer controls it. Pfaff thinks Chip Roy helped talk Johnson into it.
4. 80% support, and still stalled – The Save America Act consistently polls around 80%, with high support among Democrats and independents. West said he thinks the president had it right: a 90/10 or 99/1 issue.
5. The 60-vote claim is not the Senate rule – Every senator gets two speeches with no time limit, and after that it is a majority vote. Pfaff says John Thune is lying about the requirement, and West says he thinks a fear of not getting everything into a bill is what keeps the fight off the floor.
6. Two prongs and one principle – Only citizens vote, and voter ID confirms the voter is who they say they are. Underneath both: 230 years of same-day, paper-ballot, same-day-counted elections run by citizens, with officials there only to certify accuracy.

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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 Sep 10, 2026 live from The Conservative Caucus media suite at the 2026 RNC Midterm Convention, Dallas.