A libertarian activist group played a major role in two state elections this month, helping their favored candidates become front-runners in their upcoming general elections.
Operation Win at the Door, a project of Young Americans for Liberty, has helped win five of the nine elections they’ve been involved in since May and plans to canvass for at least 30 total races before the year’s end.
On the Left, Run for Something operates to recruit and encourage young progressives to run for office, whereas YAL is spearheading a new model that offers a full ground operation for liberty-minded candidates.
“2018 is what I call the proof of concept year … we’re trying to prove that this tactic works,” YAL President Cliff Maloney told me in an interview. “When we endorse, we don’t endorse in name only. We knock 30 to 35 thousand doors by putting ten kids on the ground for a month,” he continued.
YAL will be deploying troops to at least four more states this month including Minnesota, Arizona, Wisconsin, and now New Hampshire.
In fact, the ground game in New Hampshire is so extensive that YAL will be involved in helping 16 candidates get elected, nearly double the amount of campaigns they have done all year.
Maloney explained that before YAL gets involved, candidates must go through an extensive vetting process to determine the candidate’s chances of winning their race and their commitment to principle, should they win in the general election.
To apply for YAL’s support in their race, candidates must first fill out a questionnaire on the website to explain their position on issues ranging from taxes to the legality of red light cameras. According to Maloney, their response will keep candidates accountable after they win office, making sure they will legislate by the principles they run on.
And as long as the individual believes in the principles of liberty, Maloney said they will endorse anyone, regardless of political party.
As for the two most recent races, YAL helped State Rep. Steve Johnson, R-Mich., win his re-election primary by 71 percent to 28 percent, and Missouri Republican Dirk Deaton win his primary for Missouri House by 75 percent to 24 percent.
“We’re trying to slam dunk for liberty,” said Maloney. “We want to go in and win these races so firmly that the establishment doesn’t even try to run against them and so they remember that the principles of liberty got them elected, not some one-time donor or special interest.”
The long-term goal of Win at the Door is to find candidates who show promise to rise for higher office. In these last two races, Maloney called Deaton the next Rand Paul and Steve Johnson the next Justin Amash. Both of the candidates credited their victories in large part to the assistance YAL gave them.
“Once YAL hit the ground there was not a single time that myself or my team knocked doors that YAL had not already been there,” Deaton told me in an email.
Johnson told me that, “YAL was able to assist in getting our message of liberty out to the voters. Elections come down to who can effectively get their message out to the most people and with YAL’s help we blew the competition out of the water.”
“You cannot buy passionate grassroots activists,” Maloney said. “You can buy TV ads, you can buy radio, you can buy mail, but you cannot buy passionate activists that will work day in and day out and that to me is why the tactic is so valuable.”
While YAL’s volunteers are not legally able to coordinate directly with their candidates, under the direction of YAL doorknockers have gone to well more than 60,000 doors in the last two elections.
On a small scale, winning more than half your races in Republican-leaning districts seems like a cake walk, but Maloney says he has plans to scale this even larger. By 2022 his goal is to get YAL involved in more than 250 races. And while these numbers are nothing to sneeze at—winning in this many districts would amount to nearly 22 percent of the 5,400+ state legislature seats (not counting state senate seats). And even if 2,700 of these districts already vote Republican, Maloney says his goal will be to elect principled candidates from whichever party they decide to run on.
“We are the insurgency that will stop the rise of socialism in America,” Maloney said.
In the long term, Maloney says his program will help small-government candidates build the infrastructure and collect the data they’ll need to one day run for federal office, inevitably ballooning the number of pro-liberty members of Congress.
“Politicians do 3 things. They run for office, they run for re-election and they run for election to higher office.”
And while Maloney believes they run with honest intentions, he says when they realize the good they do at the local level, they are bound to desire higher office.
William Nardi is a contributor to Red Alert Politics and a former intern for the Washington Examiner.
