EXCLUSIVE: Losing Wisconsin is Proof We Need the 'Permanent Campaign' to Win

Would that Democrats' conquest of the Wisconsin Supreme Court last Tuesday was just a bad April Fools' Day joke.

Conservatives may succumb to the temptation to grieve after doing so much right—Republican candidate Brad Schimel ran a great campaign, after all, and for once we outspent the Left $53 million to $45 million. Tempting, sure—but that'd be a serious mistake headed into next year's midterms.

We didn't lose because Schimel lacked funding; we lost because national Republicans still fight today's battles with yesteryear's tactics.

Make no mistake, there are enough votes for a Republican to win Wisconsin's statewide elections. Trump proved Wisconsin remains a purple state: Eminently winnable, but only if we embrace coordinated voter registration, early voting, and microtargeting as core elements to victory.

Winning the next fight—and the one after that—will take a seismic shift in the way Republicans understand voting. For strategists, the day after Election Day can't be a vacation; it's the beginning of the next campaign. For voters, no election is optional or unimportant. For donors, money must come early and often. Expensive, last-minute TV ads won't cut it when the Left spent years building a multi-billion-dollar death star to elect Kamala Harris, Tammy Baldwin, or Susan Crawford.

In short, the America First movement must adopt the "permanent campaign" mindset if we want to get serious about taking back our country. Wisconsin proves it.

Playing the Long Game

The old-fashioned model of winning elections meant building up and tearing down campaign infrastructure every two years. Both parties did it (to the consultant class's delight), until Democrats devised a better way to preserve institutional knowledge and voter data for the next election. Instead of tearing down, they just kept building. For the Left, the lights never go out and the race never ends.

That took a sea change in both campaign infrastructure and donors' commitment to winning elections. It also took time. Starting around 2004, the Left developed an intricate web of messaging strategists, voting data centers, door-knockers, registration nonprofits, and partisan turnout operations that work (more or less) in harmony with one vision: Total Democrat domination, always and everywhere. Pulling it off meant redirecting resources from ads and the DNC toward this money-hungry mammoth.

The 2020 election marked that machine's greatest triumph. COVID, "Zuck bucks," and other shenanigans aside, Democrats showed they could nominate a moldy banana peel like Joe Biden and still turn out the maximum number of Democratic voters—flipping red states like Arizona and Georgia blue for the first time in decades. They didn't do it through persuasion or good ideas, but rather the power of concentrated registration, turnout, and microtargeting efforts built up over the course of two decades.

This permanent campaign machine isn't perfect. Kamala Harris proved in 2024 that issues and personalities still matter. Yet Democrats' turnout machine still came achingly close to winning, especially in Wisconsin, the closest-run swing state. It failed for three reasons.

First, the radical Biden regime proved a total disaster for most Americans, especially independents.

Second, Donald Trump assembled a multi-ethnic, multi-generational coalition, much of it poached from the Democrats' own base.

Third, Trump went all in on early and absentee voting, while groups in his orbit got serious about microtargeting new Republican voters. In other words, Democrats gave us an opportunity to win and Trump took it—and the entire GOP took a big step toward adopting the permanent campaign.

Too few have considered how providential that victory was, given the "progressive" juggernaut we faced. Democrats and their donors pioneered the permanent campaign model 21 years ago. Yet by and large, Republicans only noticed it 5-ish years ago, and have had even less time than that to build their own infrastructure in time for the 2024 presidential election—but they pulled it off.

Take Wisconsin, where Biden entered Election Day in 2020 with a 600,000 early vote lead and won by just 20,700 votes. Certain Republicans noticed… and got smart about early voting.

In 2024, Harris entered Election Day with a 200,000 early vote lead. This time Trump won by 29,600 votes. Instead of relying on rallies and voter enthusiasm, conservative turnout groups like American Majority Action, Hunter Nation, and the Wisconsin Faith & Freedom Coalition built real election infrastructure to find, register, and turn out key conservative demographics that put Trump over the finish line. Republicans cut deep into Democrats' early vote lead, hacking it down by an astonishing two-thirds, and actually won early in-person voting.

Those conservatives followed the lessons of the permanent campaign. Then we won the White House, and too many Republicans went home to celebrate. They popped champagne and thanked a merciful God. While the Republicans' war machine screeched to a halt, Democrats geared up for the fight in April.

The Votes Are There

Just compare turnout for the past three elections.

In Nov. 2024, Trump netted 1.7 million votes in Wisconsin to Harris' 1.67 million votes, a margin of 29,600 votes.

In April 2025, Brad Schimel got approximately 1.06 million votes to Crawford's 1.3 million votes, a margin of 238,238 votes.

That means Crawford underperformed Harris by 367,000 votes and won, whereas Schimel underperformed Trump by 634,000 votes and lost.

Granted, the Schimel-Crawford race had higher-than-anticipated turnout for a non-partisan, off-month election in an off-year. So let's view it next to the 2023 Supreme Court election turnout, which was significantly lower than this year.

In 2023, Republican Daniel Kelly won 818,000 votes to liberal Justice Janet Protasiewicz's 1.02 million votes; she won by 203,431 votes.

Schimel grew his vote tally by 244,499 votes over Kelly's two years prior. If Schimel had run his 2025 race in 2023, he would've beaten Janet Protasiewicz by 41,068 votes—an even larger margin than Trump's victory over Harris.

Instead, Susan Crawford grew her vote tally by 279,306 votes compared with Protasiewicz and gave Democrats a lock on the high court. Why? Democrats kept building even after they won that race in 2023. They started preparing for the April 2025 court race in April 2023, giving them a two-year head start over conservatives who waited until late 2024 to get battle-ready.

Going Grassroots

Still, these numbers show that Republicans have a good trajectory to win a hyper-competitive state like Wisconsin… but only if they can reach persuadable voters when Trump isn't on the ballot. That means turning to the permanent campaign model.

I spoke with Fair Courts America executive director Andrew Wynne, an independent expenditure committee that spent $4 million supporting Schimel in partnership with Restoration of America.

"If you compare this race with the 2022 governor's race, you see the problem," Wynne explained. "Crawford earned 96% of the votes that Democrat Tony Evers got in '22, whereas Schimel only won 84% of the votes cast for Republican Tim Michels."

"That gap reveals the importance of doing grassroots organizing on a continual basis," he added. "Clearly, we have to keep the Trump coalition plugged in and ready to go to the polls for elections even when Trump's not on the ballot."

Trump brought in non-traditional voters who gave him victory in 2016 and 2024. But this new Republican coalition doesn't yet have the "vote every election" mentality, Wynne told me. And that's a problem in Wisconsin, where "Democrats have the benefit of years of symbiotic growth with the party and outside groups. They're made up of the same leadership—the teachers' unions, trial lawyers, progressive activists, pro-abortion activists—the professional organizers who communicate non-stop to their likely voters."

"That relationship means even the disengaged Democrat voters show up when the organizers make the ask to support a candidate like Crawford," he observed. "The key is finding cultural touchstones that bring those voters together. That's infinitely more valuable than trying to rally them towards a national party brand."

"Democrats are able to scale up their electorate in a way Republicans can't compete with in Wisconsin" under the old model, said Matt Batzel, the Wisconsin-based national executive director of American Majority Action (AMA), in an interview with Restoration News. "We have to make early voting a habit to compete."

Matt Batzel, American Majority

AMA took a lead role in pushing early voting in Wisconsin in last year, which delivered the state for Trump, and Batzel sees rising Republican turnout in 2025 compared with 2023 as a "good sign" for Republicans. It just wasn't enough this year.

"Brad Schimel got the most Supreme Court votes ever in Wisconsin," he explained, "except for his opponent. That's not nothing."

A key problem: Messaging.

"Our best issue was voter ID. We didn't message it enough," Batzel believes, referring to the voter ID constitutional amendment (Question 1) also on the Schimel/Crawford ballot. It passed 63–37%. "The Right's message was overcomplicated, with 5-part arguments about bad judges in Illinois and New York," he continued. "The Left's message was simple: This race is about Elon Musk, Donald Trump, abortion, and Schimel's record as Attorney General on rape kits." That helped Democrats draw in national audiences to raise money for a statewide race as revenge for losing in 2024, much of it from mega-donors like billionaire George Soros and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D).

Recall that Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (NY) called Crawford "a strong Democratic candidate" able to deliver his party two additional House seats in the upcoming midterms. A Democrat fundraising email from March similarly argued Crawford’s victory could "result in Democrats [winning] half the seats needed to win control of the House in 2026.”

Democrats' early start also meant they were able to get on the air faster than Republicans, which helped them define voter perception about the candidates first. "Whoever defines himself early wins, and Crawford did that well," Batzel said. "I had a friend from church who told me she can't vote for Schimel because he's 'corrupt.' She learned that from an ad."

Under Batzel, AMA has trained 350 conservative political candidates over the past 12 years in Wisconsin. A key part of that training is pushing back on opposition narratives. "What we tell candidates is, the best way to insulate yourself from attack ads is to meet voters face-to-face," he explained. "When AMA had face-to-face conversations with regular people, we were able to convince them to vote for Schimel."

They also discovered many conservative voters who didn't know which candidate was the conservative in a non-partisan election—perhaps as much as 5 percentage points in Crawford's favor.

Restoration of America's data team estimates that 76,000 Wisconsinites who voted for Trump in November may have cast a ballot for Crawford in April—strong evidence that they didn't connect Schimel with the Trump agenda. "Personal conversations can quickly clarify that," Batzel pointed out.

No candidate can be everywhere at once, of course. "So you have to use proxies—well-trained volunteers and staff who know you and your story—to relate to voters. It's neighbors talking with neighbors, congregants with congregants. Then they're inoculated, they won't believe those attack ads," he said.

That's easier for Democrats, whose votes are heavily concentrated in dense cities such as Madison and Milwaukee, which provided more than one-third of all of Crawford's votes. Republican voters tend to be more spread out, requiring grassroots infrastructure to meet and engage people. But it is doable with the right infrastructure.

"What we needed were fewer TV ads tearing apart the opposition and more investment in high-quality voter conversations," Batzel argues. That means spending more money building volunteer infrastructure year-in, year-out as a long-term growth strategy. "It's labor-intensive and staff-heavy, sure," he continued, "but it builds relationships with voters so we know what issues they care about, are frustrated over.

"It always comes back to relationships, being active in the community."

Reaching the Hard-to-Reach

There are Republicans, and then there are Trump voters.

Trump's superpower is his ability to rally non-traditional, right-leaning voters to his cause—black, Hispanic, immigrant, young males, all moved sharply right in 2024. But the work of cementing them into the Republican Party has only just started—and winning tight races without Trump at the top of the ticket depends on it. Failing to do so in Wisconsin "is a recipe for disaster," argues Keith Mark, CEO of Hunter Nation. "And when your country's at stake, losing is not an acceptable option."

Mark, an unpaid volunteer CEO who also served in Trump's Interior Department, founded Hunter Nation in 2018 to strategically message a single demographic: Hunters.

Keith Mark, Hunter Nation

"There's nothing magical about what Hunter Nation does," he explained in an interview with Restoration News. "We know we're dealing with a demographic that's low-propensity, so we micro-target them individually with messengers they trust."

The key word here: "Micro."

44% of hunters in Wisconsin vote Democrat, Mark explained. Simply turning out all hunters en masse won't help elect Republicans. That's why Hunter Nation carefully combs its voter data for partisanship clues. It works: "Less than 2% of our mailers come back negative," he pointed out.

Hunter Nation turned out 450,000 Trump voters in 2024, most of whom hadn't voted in the last 2–4 presidential election cycles. That's 12–16 years. While 2025 figures haven't yet been released, Mark says this year's turnout among hunters will far exceed what they turned out in 2023. "We're reshaping how this low-propensity demographic is voting absentee in just a few cycles," and for less than $4 per vote.

Virtually all of the hunters Mark's group targets are Trump supporters "who could go either way on other races." Reaching vote-shy voters takes time and resources. "We have to message these hunters maybe 10 times with hunting-related messages on issues they care about, like the wolves in northern Wisconsin, before we can slip in a GOTV [get-out-the-vote] message." But when the money comes late, there's little runway to reach voters before Election Day.

To pull it off, Hunter Nation launched a multi-month get-out-the-vote blitz with Ted Nugent, Donald Trump, Jr., and Brett Favre to fire up Schimel voters, and the response was "incredible."

"Hunters want to keep men out of girls' sports and girls' bathrooms. They care about gun rights being in jeopardy from Soros, Pritzker, and [new DNC vice chair] David Hogg. They care about election integrity—all of our ads included the voter ID amendment alongside Schimel," Mark told me.

2025 Hunter Nation advertisement

Naturally, the hunter demographic overlaps with Second Amendment advocates and military veterans, which can yield counterintuitive—and critical—insights. "Among the veteran-hunter slice, our message with Donald Trump, Jr. generated negative responses because of his dad's affiliation with Elon Musk. Vets were frustrated that Musk is 'stealing money from the VA,' so we changed our messaging there." Notably, that was even before Musk thrust himself into the center of the Supreme Court race in March.

That insight only arose because Hunter Nation had been embedded among Wisconsin hunters for years. It's the kind of revelation you can't glean from a cushy consultancy in Washington.

But Mark brings it fundamentally back to the permanent campaign. "Republicans pack their tents and go home after Election Day," he said, "but the Left is always looking at the next election.

"The GOP has to do that, too, or we'll lose."

Meeting New Voters Where They Are

"The most important date is the day after the election. If you lose that mindset, you lose. Period."

John Pudner is president of the Wisconsin Faith & Freedom Coalition (WFFC), part of a national network of grassroots groups targeting Evangelicals and Catholics. He led faith-based outreach strategy for George W. Bush's 2004 reelection campaign.

The problem with the old model, he said in an interview, is thinking about what happens after the ballots are in. "Knowing the operation will continue after Election Day means you can focus on winning instead of keeping the lights on after Tuesday comes and goes," he told me. That's the permanent campaign mindset. "It's so much better than starting from scratch every two years."

John Pudner, Wisconsin Faith & Freedom Coalition

WFFC had 36 canvassers active in the Schimel race—virtually all of them native Wisconsinites supplemented by a few out-of-state "heavy-hitters"—who knocked 50,000 doors and passed out 200,000 voter education pamphlets, mostly outside churches. "The trick isn't just finding good churches," Pudner explained, "sometimes it's figuring out where people go to eat after Mass and approaching them there. It's delicate."

Whereas conservative Evangelical pastors might give their congregants a sermon on biblical citizenship, WFFC discovered Spanish-speaking Catholics hung out near food trucks after Mass—letting canvassers slip in casually for a chat about voting.

"Our most effective turnout tool was simply laying out the issues side-by-side," he said. "We listed candidates' positions on abortion, voter ID, etc. Nothing negative, no grainy black-and-white photos of the liberal, just straight facts. It helped us reach more priests and pastors."

Pudner's biggest surprise: WFFC's voting bilingual guide. "We got a 42% click rate on an email link just to print this guide," he told me. "It was incredible—I've never seen it so high."

In total, WFFC targeted 90 conservative-leaning churches for close, personal canvassing efforts. Another 90 received a lighter touch, usually with mailers. Pudner says most ultimately turned out for Trump in 2024, but fewer turned out for Schimel in April. Many of these voters lacked basic awareness of the candidates.

"No, I don't think I'm going to go [vote]. I don't know where they moved my polling place," one voter told a WFFC canvasser—even though he had yard signs for Trump and Schimel alike on display. 2024 voters were simply more motivated to vote for Trump after the Left's lawfare crusade to bankrupt, imprison, or remove Trump from the ballot—and that fire wasn't there in April.

That's a failure to keep voters "warm" between elections. And it will happen again in Virginia's gubernatorial race in seven months, and again in the 2026 midterms, if Republicans don't act swiftly.

"That's why we need the permanent campaign," Wynne believes. He's right. The question is, will Republicans listen?

WFFC 2025 voter guide

(INTERVIEW: Trump Won Wisconsin Thanks to Conservatives Adapting to Mail-In and Early Voting)