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April 6, 2022 - Doug Collins Podcast
57:02
You can’t lead if you don’t know how to follow: A discussion with Ralph Reed
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By who?
Georgia GOP Congressman Doug Collins.
How is it?
The greatest thing I have ever heard in my whole life.
I could not believe my ears.
In this house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule.
It has been said today, where is bravery?
I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found.
It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else.
We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
Why?
Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority and it ain't gonna be that fun.
All right, everybody, we're back.
Joined today by Ralph Reed, Faith and Freedom, Christian Coalition.
You just look up Ralph Reed, you see, basically, you see a lot of the history of the last 40 years of the conservative movement.
He has been involved in a lot of it.
He is at the forefront of it and has become a good friend.
Actually, we did not know each other until a few years ago, probably the last decade, but we actually grew up in the same part of the world in Georgia and not very far from each other.
So, Ralph, welcome to the podcast.
That's good.
Good talk.
Got lots of stuff to talk about today, and I want to get to it all, but I always do, especially with guests who are high profile, who people see us, and one of the things I found when I started doing this podcast was people knew me from my TV, that media appearances.
They didn't know from maybe where I came from or background, and so one of the things I always like to do is start, especially with guests who a lot of people know, and It's just sort of saying, how did you get to the place where, you know, as the old saying is, how did you get to be Ralph Reed?
I mean, how did that happen?
Because somebody may be out there looking to say, you know, I'm wanting to be involved in my community, wanting to be involved in my faith, wanting to be involved in politics, but they may have come from a background in which, you know, they don't know how to get there.
I grew up as a Navy brat.
My father served on an aircraft carrier in Vietnam, so we lived all over.
We lived in California.
San Jose, San Diego.
He did his training in Pensacola where my sister was born.
Spent time in Miami, his hometown, and then we moved to Toccoa when I was a sophomore in high school.
So it was a bit of a culture shock for both me and them when I came from Miami, Florida to Toccoa, Georgia, you know, a little textile town in the North Georgia mountains.
But what happened, Doug, is, you know, I was growing up And coming of age politically in the 60s and early 70s, which was a time of great civil strife and turmoil and big issues, the Vietnam War, later Watergate, the Great Society, the anti-war movement, the hippies, the yippies, all the protests that went on.
Doug, people think we're divided now.
I remember when we had domestic terrorists Blowing up military recruiting centers and firebombing the Pentagon.
There were shootings on college campuses.
And I was just very concerned at an early age about my country.
And I ended up volunteering on a congressional race when I was 14 years old.
About all you can do when you're 14 is knock on doors.
You know, I was one of those teenage Republicans or homeschooler types.
You know, they just went out there.
We'd start at 9 in the morning, and I'd knock on doors until dark.
And you know this because you're a grassroots guy, Doug.
You know, I was just a kid, but it was amazing how much I learned and how much I came to know by talking to voters face-to-face at their doors, you know, engaging them.
I probably knew more about what was going on in that district by the end of my Volunteer period then you know then Hey Ralph, can I jump in right there on a second?
Because I think this is so important.
You brought out a great point.
How many times today, because you're still involved in campaigns, I am as well, and I hear from candidates all the time, that they want to start off by running a campaign.
They want to start off by being the campaign manager.
It seems that there has become a little bit of a mentality in working in general, but working in campaigns, that it's beneath them to knock on a door or to put up a sign.
That's where I learned, like you said, I learned more from putting in signs and talking to people about politics than I ever did sitting in a room with, you know, nowadays the Zoom calls.
Right.
No, no question about it.
And, you know, that's really true, Doug, in every endeavor of life.
I mean, if you're in ministry, as you have been earlier in your career, you know, it's two-by-two visitation.
You know, it's home groups.
It's small groups.
I mean, it's not...
Standing behind a pulpit in front of 5,000 people.
The way you get to that point is by doing the blocking and tackling and the door-to-door and the visitation.
Somebody fills out a visitor card and you call them or you go see them.
And you get involved in their lives.
And that's how politics is.
And I learned that very young.
No one who gets hired at UPS Georgia-based company.
Good friends of mine and yours, I would guess.
Great company.
They do a tremendous job.
You can get hired as a senior vice president for marketing at UPS, and your first two weeks, you drive a truck, and you make deliveries, and you interact with customers.
If you want to get good, I would say, to answer your question or maybe the question for some of your listeners and viewers, How do I get involved in this?
That's how you do it.
The advice I give people, you know, young people who come to me and say, what do I do?
I say, volunteer on a campaign.
Find a candidate you're excited about.
Now, who was that candidate for me beyond this family friend who ran for Congress in Florida?
It was a guy named Ronald Reagan.
You know, I was a freshman at the University of Georgia and, you know, without, you know, beating up on Jimmy Carter, Until Joe Biden came along, I mean, it was like the worst presidency we had ever seen.
18% interest rates, 13% inflation, you know, hostages in Iran, no apparent ability to get them out, Soviet troops in Afghanistan.
It felt like we were, if not losing the Cold War, we certainly weren't winning it.
And I was worried.
And I was worried about my future.
So I got involved in the Reagan campaign.
And then I ran for chairman of the College Republicans at the University of Georgia.
And this was back when Georgia was not a Republican state.
I mean, it was a Democratic state.
I don't believe there was a single elected statewide Republican.
And Doug, you served in the State House.
When I interned down at the Capitol, out of 180 members of the State House, And I'm doing this from memory, so I hope I don't get it wrong.
But I think we had 20 or 25 Republicans in the whole chamber out of 180. There were seven Republicans in a 56-member state Senate.
And when I ran for and was elected to that, I then went to a summer training program that was put together by the Reagan campaign.
And it was run by a guy you know Who was the youth coordinator for the Reagan 80 campaign, a guy named Morton Blackwell, who's one of the great giants in the history of the conservative movement.
And I went to, I think it was a two or three day workshop where he went through the technology of how to run a successful youth effort and literally, Doug, all I did was sit there for three days in a hotel in Washington D.C. and take notes And then I went back to the University of Georgia and I did exactly what I had been taught to do.
We went door to door.
We surveyed every student in every dorm, in every apartment complex, in every fraternity or sorority house.
We found all the Reagan supporters.
We got them all registered to vote.
We made sure that they that they voted either in their home county or in Clark County.
And we also there was a mock election.
And we made sure every one of them won the mock election.
And in the largest state university, in Jimmy Carter's home state, Ronald Reagan won the mock election at the University of Georgia by 51 to 35 percent.
And I was sitting in my dorm room.
It was a week before the actual election, and Carter and Reagan were going to debate that night.
And, you know, Back then you didn't have cell phones.
It was just a black rotary dial phone bolted to the wall of my dorm room.
And I was sitting there working or doing homework or something.
And the phone rang and I answered it.
And they said, is Ralph Reed there?
And I said, this is Ralph Reed.
And it was the Reagan campaign.
And they had heard about the mock election victory.
They wanted all the details, the number of votes, the percentages.
And they wanted a quote from a student, and that night at the debate, they dropped a press release on the desk of every reporter covering that debate, saying, Carter has lost the confidence of the young people of his own home state, and they're rushing to Reagan.
And after that, I went to Washington, worked on the Reagan reelect, and, you know, on and on it went.
But back to your point, Doug, All I did was just take the most basic grassroots techniques and execute them.
And that's still how campaigns are run today.
Even in the days of super PACs and billion dollar presidential campaigns, you know, and the internet and micro-targeting and big data, you still win elections door to door, person to person, precinct by precinct, neighborhood by neighborhood.
Well, it is amazing.
You know, it's the simple things that you go back to.
And, you know, it's sort of funny, you know, you mentioned the Carter administration just being, you know, as bad as it was and with the economy as it was.
Now you get into Biden, which is making Carter actually look, you know, At least on par.
And, you know, the things that we're going on to.
And it's how people react to that and they go to it.
I mean, for those of us who are in politics, it makes us, you know, pull our hair out because we see an administration that's so inept.
For some of my sponsors, you know, like I got one that does precious metals, legacy precious metals.
They love it because everybody's going to gold because everything else is going, you know, out of it.
But a question comes up in that...
It's interesting enough.
My podcast will be right before that I did just the other day.
I did one on Reagan's final presidential speech.
And it was interesting, the fourth paragraph in that speech, the farewell address.
Yes.
Amazing.
What I've done is I went back and I picked up several presidents.
I'm going to do a lot more, but I've done Washington, Eisenhower, and now Reagan.
And I did his time for choosing speech as well.
And in walking through that speech, especially, I mean, the very first, like the first four paragraphs, he talks about How time had passed, but what he mentioned was, is going past people, seeing people, missing a wave, not being able to connect.
What you just talked about was, here was the president who endured himself to many on not only America, but the world stage, because he cared about people, the very essence of what you were talking about in politics.
No doubt about it.
I mean, it's a people business, and it's really...
I kind of described a little bit about how I got involved in politics.
It was a little bit later in my early 20s when I made a decision for Christ that changed my life in a very dramatic way.
And I've always believed, Doug, not just because I personally am a believer in Christ, but also because I think it is the most effective way.
I've seen my civic engagement as a way of trying to serve and meet the needs of others.
And if you study Christ's ministry, and I'm in no way suggesting that he was a political figure, he was not.
But some of the models are very similar.
He didn't spend his time in the power center of the time, which was Jerusalem.
That was the power center in the Jewish world.
The power center in the world at large, of course, was Rome.
The Roman Empire was...
The greatest power that the world had ever seen at that time, and they were subjugating the Jewish people.
But he didn't spend a lot of time there.
He spent his time out in Galilee and in the outer reaches of Judea and Samaria and in the Decapolis, which was the ten Roman cities that the Romans had built in the Jewish homeland, the Jewish lands.
And what did he do?
He met people's needs right where they were.
If they were hungry, they ate.
If they were thirsty, they drank.
If they were blind, they saw.
If they were lame, they walked.
If they experienced any kind of affliction, and this is important, before he ever preached a word or gave testimony through either his miracles or through his preaching as to who he was, He met their needs.
He was concerned about their needs.
And I think when either party gets off track, it's when they have such blinders on that they're following their own agenda rather than listening to where people are hurting.
And I think Exhibit A right now is, and I don't want to get ahead of ourselves, but if you want to talk about today's politics, Biden and the left and the modern Democratic Party are so fixated on pursuing their climate change and renewable energy agenda and punishing and indeed,
I think, ultimately wiping out the U.S. domestic energy industry and the fossil fuel industry that they're not listening to voters who have seen the price of gasoline go from, you know, roughly $2.25 I guess the average today nationally is roughly $4.50 or so, a lot more in some states.
Doug, it's gone up $0.60 in the last 30 days.
Now, if you're not focused on how to meet that need and you're not willing to do and pursue policies, there are people who are really hurting.
People on the very edge who have a hard time paying their bills normally, if they go to the gas station once a week and the cost of filling up their tank goes from $50 to $100 or $60 to $100, which is what happens, they don't have the ability to pay their rent or they may struggle with their mortgage or they may not be able to save for their children's college.
That model of getting out of the power center Which is Washington, Manhattan, New York, wherever it is, and getting out there in the hinterlands where people actually live and work and play and listening.
Newt Gingrich, who was an important leader and mentor for me, and I think for probably you too, Newt had a model of listen, learn, lead.
Listen to people, listen to voters, learn from what they have to say, make a calculation as to how to meet the need or lead, and then put forward an agenda.
Yeah, and I think that's what we're missing right now.
And frankly, Ralph, I'm going to just be honest.
I think we're missing it on both sides at times as we look at this because it's easy to go to the quick hit, the quick, you know, what's the quick thing that's going to be, you know, I love how you talked about the old phone on the wall.
I remember those as well.
But now it's the, you know, what's the quick Twitter?
What can I pick up my phone here and get across?
And And people are getting a little bit blurred to that now.
And so when you talk about people's needs, it's just being listened to.
I think we saw an example of that, and we'll stay here for just a minute on this political side, is we saw that in Virginia last year in a state that has been turning more reliably blue statewide.
And all of a sudden you had an issue in which parents...
Felt like they weren't listening to.
And what was really interesting, I'd love to hear your comment on this.
I heard a parent that was being interviewed basically say, they didn't say that they were moving away from being liberal, but they're saying, I want to be listened to.
And they're not listening to me.
I understand.
If they would just explain it to me.
And I thought to myself, I said, here is somebody who probably voted for some of these school board members.
Who probably agrees with them on a lot of things, and these very school board members and statewide officials, Terry McCall and others, were not listening to them.
I think that's one of the most blatant examples we have of that in modern politics right now.
I couldn't agree more.
I mean, I think it's, you know, we were pretty deeply involved in Virginia, Doug.
I think we, when I say we, I mean Faith and Freedom Coalition.
We had a really great team up there.
I think we knocked on Over 350,000 doors of faith-based voters.
We built a voter file of over a million evangelical and pro-life voters and mailed them and phoned them.
And we had an Hispanic church effort underway to reach Hispanics and African Americans as well.
We had the most diverse ticket in the modern history of Virginia on the Republican side.
We had Winsome Sears, an African American Marine and former member of the Virginia Assembly, and then we had Jason Meares, who was the first Hispanic, I believe, in either party on a statewide ballot.
And, you know, the other side was just, they weren't tone deaf, they were deaf.
I mean, they were not listening at all.
You know, people were dealing with It was kind of a perfect storm where people were reacting to the lockdowns and the mandates that they felt were keeping their children out of the classroom for long periods of time and potentially doing long-term damage to their learning and their intellectual development.
And sadly, you may have seen it, Doug, there was a study that came out this week from McKinsey that shows that throughout the world, including in North America, Children have lost between eight months and two years in their educational progress during this recent pandemic.
And then the other thing that was happening, relatedly, is because the children were learning remotely, parents were standing over their child's laptop, and for many of them for the first time, looking at the curriculum that their children were being taught,
And we're horrified by some of the ideological liberal agenda that was being indoctrinated to their, you know, their children were being indoctrinated in.
And when this came up, you know, Terry McAuliffe, who I know Terry, I mean, in my career, Terry was one of the smartest guys I ever knew in politics.
And he was a pretty darn good candidate the first time he ran for governor.
But This time, when it came up in the debate, he said parents shouldn't be involved in the education of their children or something to that effect.
You couldn't be more right, Doug, and it's a lesson for us.
I'm not sure they've learned anything, by the way.
I don't know that they learned anything from the Virginia defeat.
I think the other lesson, by the way, out of Virginia, as we go into 22 and 24, And you'll appreciate this as a guy who's been on a lot of ballots and won a lot of races.
I certainly know this was the case when you ran for Congress.
I guess that was 2010. 2012 is candidates matter.
The ability to appeal beyond your own team, touch other people, and be a candidate that The important quality that you're looking for is that ability to connect with people where they may not agree with the candidate on every issue,
but they find them likable, they trust their judgment, they sense an authenticity, they sense that this candidate has been real with them, that it's not just a bunch of canned lines, and they're like, you know, I may not agree with the candidate on this or that, but I'm going to vote for him anyway.
That's important.
I believe so.
Why, though, is that route being missed by consultants?
We're both here in Georgia, but you and I both do campaigns.
We look at the political picture across the landscape of our country.
And you know what is interesting to me is I'm hearing more and more candidates who simply become Parents of whatever audience that they're in front of.
They want to make those audiences happy and they're being told, hey, you know, tell them this, tell them that.
And it's that sort of cookie cutter mentality of politics that believes, well, if I just appeal to the ones who like me, we'll be okay if we're in our district, if we're in a D district the same way.
And what you just said there was so important, and I know it was in my career.
I had plenty of people who disagreed with me, but I would go into the room and I'd say, okay, here's why I believe what I believe.
I understand why you believe that, but here's why I believe that.
And you can walk away with a...
Frankly, I walk away with a better understanding, and maybe not in agreement, but I'll walk away from a better understanding with somebody I disagree with than somebody I have to tell them what makes them happy.
Right.
Right.
Yeah, and that's why you were as successful as you were.
And look, I think it's a number of things.
One is, I remember when I was working for George W. Bush, this was very early on in the 2000 campaign.
It was in the primaries.
I'm pretty sure it was in 99. And I don't remember the audience anymore, but I remember it was a New York crowd.
And it was some fairly socially moderate people.
Republican donors, including a lot of pro-choice women.
The pro-life issue, Doug, in a lot of ways, has now been fully litigated within the Republican Party, and I think the pro-life side has won.
I think the Republican Party has become a pro-life party, but for a long time, There was a lot of sturm and drang.
And there was still a lot of controversy, particularly among the donor class.
I don't get the kind of pushback that I used to because, again, I think we fought that out and it's over.
We don't even fight about the platform anymore, and we used to do that at every convention.
There was always an effort to either remove the pro-life plank or moderate it or something.
So anyway, George W. Bush walks into this room.
There's a lot of skepticism because he's pro-life and unapologetically so.
And some person, I believe it was a woman, stood up and said, you know, I'm having a real hard time getting there with you.
I like what you did on education in Texas.
I like what you've done with juvenile justice.
I like your personality.
I think you're a very inclusive leader.
You've done very well among minorities and among Democrats in Texas.
I like that.
But I'm having a hard time getting past this because I believe it's a woman's body and it's her right to make the decision.
What would you say to me?
And George W. Bush said, well, you know, I just want you to know I believe what I believe and I've thought about this a lot and I believe strongly that we should err on the side of life.
But I want you to know that I hear where you're coming from.
And I understand that there are millions of people who feel like you do.
And he connected with her and showed a respect for her view even as he disagreed.
And she ended the evening as a supporter.
And so I think that's number one, is showing respect and having a civil dialogue.
I think today things are so divided we've kind of lost that.
I think we need to bring it back.
I think we can model it.
Another thing I would say, Doug, and again, you've done this, you could tell this story better than I can, but a lot of this is about being willing to go back to a state or a district, go back to one's constituents, plant your feet, and be the last person to leave that room.
You stay there and you talk to every single person You explain your position, explain why you voted the way you did or took the position you did, and I'll tell you what they'll do just about every time, is voters will give you an A for effort.
They're like, you know, I don't agree with him, but I have to say, he or she had a good reason, they thought it through, they had some facts, they studied it, they looked at it, And you know what?
They listened to me.
And they didn't blow me off and they just didn't head for the parking lot.
That is important.
It's just hard work.
You know that.
It is.
I think what you hit there was the fact that you actually understood the subject.
You actually could have a conversation about facts.
This is what I'm getting concerned about, Ralph.
We're just going to park here for a minute.
I'm getting concerned more and more that candidates are depending on endorsements and money more than they're depending on communication and outreach.
I'm concerned that more and more members of Congress, as you talked about the polarization here, I'm very proud of the fact that we passed very bipartisan bills under Donald Trump's We passed very bipartisan bills, frankly, under Obama's administration.
And I never gave up who I was.
I never gave my conservatism away, but yet we did criminal justice reform.
We did surveillance reform.
We did intellectual property, music.
We did a lot of things.
Ralph, I'm very concerned that people are wanting to hear what they want to hear And it's led to this polarization in the sense that they believe because they're getting their information, you know, basically to tickle their ears is the old biblical term.
How are we going to break back out of that?
I mean, because right now it's working.
And as you know from your time at Faith and Freedom and more majority before then, Mia's running campaign, your consultants, all your groups around them, they're going to go to what works until it doesn't work anymore.
How are we going to break this out from a governing standpoint?
Because that's what I see as the lacking piece now.
Campaigns have become very coordinated, and we do it.
It's like we fight the battles to get to the game, and then when the game comes, we're trying to find the battle to get to the game again.
Yeah, I think it's great.
I agree with you.
I think it's a big problem.
There's kind of been a dumbing down, and there's a lot of reasons for that, some of which are structural.
I mean, I do think, Doug, that the advances in data analytics and mapping have enabled us on both sides to draw congressional districts that are now so reliably partisan in one direction or another.
You know, when I was coming up longer ago than I... I care to mention.
It was not really like that.
Districts were drawn.
Yes, you knew voting behavior, but outside of that, you didn't have a lot of information on voters beyond what was on the voter file, which was basically age, race, and what primary they voted in.
Today, you can track with an algorithm hundreds of data points.
And the result is that, you know, a combination of members of Congress wanting safe seats.
Legislators, I know this may come as a shock to some, but state legislators have a way of drawing districts that they can then run in.
No!
Yeah, it happens.
And the big data and the data science, I mean...
I think we're down to 20 or 30 genuinely competitive seats in the country.
Now, it's going to be more than that, by the way, in 2022, because any district that Biden carried by 10 points or less is going to be in play, but that's going to be an anomaly.
You know, that's going to be a one-off of a midterm that's going to be a blowout for the Democrats.
But you take a typical election, you're literally down to a handful of seats now.
And It's fascinating to me, Doug.
I haven't really seen a really good analysis of this, but the other thing that's happening, and it was accelerated by the pandemic, but it was already going on, people are now moving to blue states and red states to go where they're more comfortable politically.
You know, that was not true when I came into politics.
Do you realize that you have 6,000 people a day moving to Florida?
6,000 people a day.
Do the math on that.
And not all of them, but I think the bulk of them are excited about the way Ron DeSantis kept the state open, the way he didn't buy into the lockdown mentality, the fact that he had the guts to sign the parental rights bill after Disney and other woke corporations distorted its meaning.
So all of this is creating this polarization.
Now what's the answer to the issue you raised?
And I'm just going to give you my answer.
I'm not saying it's the answer.
But it goes back to a saying that we Reaganites had in Washington during the Reagan presidency.
And it came from the top.
It came from the president.
And it was, get the policy right and the politics will take care of themselves.
And what really distorts this whole thing and gets us down the wrong track is we get it backwards.
We focus on the politics first and then the policy flows from the political judgment.
That's not the way to do it.
The way to do it is get the policy right.
And there are a number of these issues like criminal justice reform which you mentioned and it was my Great pleasure to work with you on that.
It was a top legislative priority of Faith and Freedom.
You were at the time, I think, the ranking Republican on judiciary, as I recall.
And you did yeoman's work on that.
Another one is immigration.
You know, Faith and Freedom, my organization, doesn't really fit in either particular camp because we're not in favor of open borders.
We support the rule of law, but we don't believe that properly managed that immigration poses a threat to our economy or our future.
In fact, we think the opposite.
So, we take a position in support of securing the border, enforcing the rule of law, ending chain migration, providing priority To the minor children and spouses of legal immigrants,
move them to the front of the line, we think that's pro-family, get rid of all this great society-era chain migration, and then allow people to enter the country legally based on two national imperatives.
One is strengthening the family.
Doug, we have people who are legal Residents of the United States and citizens who followed all the rules came here legally and they have a child waiting in a line 10 years long in a country that's 11 or 12 years old that they can't have join them until they're in their 20s.
That's not only dumb, it's immoral.
And then the second priority should be our economic needs.
So if we have a need for workers in a particular We believe those are biblical principles.
We don't have time in this format today to go through that.
But we sit down at Faith and Freedom, and we don't worry about the politics.
Because you know what?
We believe that if we get the policy right based on conservative principles and biblical principles, and we make the case right, that the politics will resolve themselves.
And there are a lot of people, Doug, in the Republican Party who have spent decades telling candidates like you to downplay your faith, to downplay your views on abortion, to downplay your commitment to sanctity of life, and then they'd go out and do a poll and tell you, well, you know, if you say that, you're going to lose the race.
Nonsense.
It is the right thing to protect unborn life.
It is the right thing to strengthen the family.
If we'll just lay out sound policy, we'll get votes of people who don't agree with us on those issues.
We're seeing that right now.
I mean, especially when it came to what we went back to a little bit ago when we were talking about Virginia.
I've never met the rarity.
I mean, like the 3 or 4% minority is a parent who truly doesn't care about their children.
And so that was, I mean, a broad spectrum where we were able to capitalize on the fact that, hey, families matter.
And that cohesive unit of the family matters.
Moms and dads matter.
And I think that was something that was interesting.
But I've also seen something too, Ralph, though, that has been disturbing.
You've been a part of watching this as we go on.
And I want to take one last quick here, then I want to jump to Georgia, because Georgia is always a misunderstood state, in my mind, on the conservative front.
But that is that we have in this political arena, especially among voters, conservative voters, and frankly, liberal voters as well, this idea that if I don't get everything that I want in a political environment, it's a failure.
But yet we don't use that same standard anywhere else in our life, from business to family anywhere.
Why do you think that is so?
You know, in my experience and in my career, it is primarily caused by the fact that some of the folks who come into the civic arena, spurred by a social reform movement, And that is driven by real concerns about either some economic or moral issues that are foundational for them.
Think about the rise of what some have called the religious right, what I call the pro-family movement as that emerged in the 70s and 80s.
The Tea Party around the time that you were getting elected to Congress.
They're new to politics.
And because they're new to it...
They don't understand always that an 80% victory is not a 20% loss.
That half a loaf is better than none at all.
But I think it's even bigger than that, Doug.
And I think it's a kingdom principle.
And I promise I'm not preaching to anybody today.
I'm not going to do a sermon.
But if you study the full counsel of God as revealed through His Word, which I believe is the Bible you will see a core biblical principle that in all great Kingdom endeavors that there is an incrementalism to what we seek to accomplish in advancing what is right and just and good and you you can look at the way the Israelites subjugated the
promised land You know, they did it one city at a time.
They didn't walk in and win one big victory and it was over.
This is true historically.
You know, I have a doctorate in American history.
I was trained to be an historian.
I never really got to be one because I got sidetracked and ended up in politics.
But you look at all great social reform movements, whether it was the civil rights movement or the suffragist movement, Or the settlement house or progressive movements, populism, you know, later as I said, the pro-family movement, they all achieved their objectives over a period of decades.
You know, the NAACP was founded in 1909. It wasn't until 1957 that they got a federal civil rights bill even passed.
And that one was very limited.
And so, you know, by the time they got to the 64 Civil Rights Act and the 65 Voting Rights Act, they'd been at it for over a half a century.
That was true of the anti-slavery movement.
The suffragist movement and the temperance movement emerged in the 1870s and 80s.
You know, out of the reform movements of the post-Civil War period, and they worked for 40, 50 years to get their objectives.
So people have got to understand that the way you advance the ball in politics as a social reform movement, as people who've gotten involved in civic affairs because of a belief about a wrong that they're seeking to right, it's a marathon.
It's not a sprint.
And it's going to be eating the elephant one bite at a time.
Exactly.
Moving back, you came through a moral majority, then Faith and Freedom you started, but you were also very involved in Republican politics here in Georgia, conservative politics.
Most people don't realize, I hear this all the time, I'm wondering if you do as well, I go across the country and they just write Georgia, they just blanketly say, oh, Georgia's just a conservative state, it's just a red state.
And I'm saying, one, have you ever really watched the state?
Number two, they don't realize, and maybe listeners to the podcast today, you and I remember a time in the Georgia legislature, in fact, I was only in the second term of the Georgia General Assembly that was Republican in the House of Representatives, and that was in 2006, that Sonny Perdue was the first governor, Republican governor since Reconstruction, That was in 2002. We're in 22 now.
That's 20 years.
And Georgia went through a process of...
And I love your discussion.
It seemed like we were...
I'm going to make a statement.
We were hungry.
We won.
We gained a lot in the mid, like 2010 to 2008 to 2015. And then it's almost like we either lost our hunger or the demographics started changing and we wasn't adapting the good that was being done.
How can other states look at Georgia realizing this change is happening, and conservatives realize that we can't write off parts of the state?
And unfortunately, you and I have both seen that.
In our state, we've had major candidates who've won office, but they seemingly wrote off parts of our state.
We've got to be aware of that, don't we?
Yeah.
No question about it.
And I think, you know, I... I've been involved in the Georgia...
I was chairman of the Georgia State College Republicans 40 years ago.
I drove around the state for about a year in a Chevy Chevette and started college Republican clubs on college campuses that I don't think very many of them had seen a Republican in a long time.
And 82, unfortunately, was not a great year for us.
We had a Terrific guy who was a state senator named Bob Bell, who was our gubernatorial nominee that year, and I think he got 37 or 38 percent of the vote.
So it was a tough time, Doug.
Now, fast forward about, I don't know, what, 20 years?
And I was privileged to be state Republican chairman in Georgia the year Sonny ran for governor.
And I don't know if you know it or not, I assume you do, but we had the biggest breakthrough, the biggest number of victories in Georgia in 2002 of any state in the country in that midterm election, and we had the biggest flip from Democratic voting patterns to Republican voting patterns.
It was a total of about a 9% swing in the electorate from one midterm to another, meaning from 98 to 02. Now, how did that happen, and how can we perhaps do it again now that it's incredibly competitive?
We lost the two Senate seats in 21, barely won the governorship in 18, I think 50,000 votes out of about 4 million cast, and all the races are going to be close this year.
They're all going to be one or two points.
Three things, I think.
I'll go through them quickly.
The first I've already mentioned.
Get the policy right.
I'll mention two that I think ought to go to the front burner.
One is, you know, I mentioned the 6,000 people moving to Florida every day.
One of the reasons, not the only reason, is the fact that they have no state income tax.
You look at the states that are gaining people.
Nashville's exploding.
It's on its way to being the next Atlanta.
Texas, Florida, many others, they either have no income tax or they're dramatically lowering their income tax.
Mississippi is doing that.
I think we have a bill heading to the governor's desk.
I think we cut it from 6 to maybe 5.75.
I think now they're looking at taking it down closer to 5.25.
We need to have a plan to get that to zero, or we're going to have a very hard time, Doug, competing with these other states.
The second is, I believe, the civil rights issue of our time, which is actually not voting rights, because everybody who wants to vote in Georgia can vote.
We have over a half a million more minority voters voting today in Georgia over the The 2012 baseline when Obama was re-elected.
The civil rights issue of our time is the right to a quality education, and I think that means school choice, either a public school choice or a private or religious school choice.
Florida, by the way, has adopted that.
They don't have it for every student who wants it, but they have between 300,000 and 400,000 minority school children who are going to a school where they're safe, where they can learn.
And that's only true because of Republicans.
In fact, when Ron DeSantis ran in 2018, a race he won by only 30,000 votes out of 10 million, he ran against an African American Democrat who promised, if he was elected, to freeze the program and eventually phase it out.
And Ron DeSantis got 20% of the African American female vote Because of that issue.
So get the policy right, Doug, and we'll win more minority votes.
We'll win more suburban women.
The second thing that we have to do is we have to become a truly grassroots party again and not think that we can just go out and get 10 or 25 million in a super PAC and run a bunch of 30-second ads that nobody's watching anymore and even fewer believe.
And if we're going door to door and we're building precinct organizations, and the third, which I've already touched on, which I think is where you were going, and it's something that I think is really critical, is we need to start reaching out and building stronger support among voters who have not always felt welcome on our ranks.
And I think in order, that's Hispanics, African Americans, Asian Americans, including Indian Americans, And suburban women and younger women.
And if we'll go out there and have a program that is focused on them, I think we're on the verge, Doug.
I don't want to get overly enthusiastic here.
Let me rephrase that.
I think there's a possibility.
There's potential for the first time in your and my lifetime for a Republican presidential nominee To win a majority of Hispanic votes in 2024. We've never seen that.
The highest we ever got was 44% under George W. Bush in 2004. And a lot of that is their Hispanics' revulsion at the socialist government overreach of the Democratic Party.
So those are the ways that we win, even in this tough environment.
I agree with you 150%.
Finishing up here, and there's so much more that I want to have you back on at some point because I want to dig into some of these, especially these issues of how we, you know, the issue of school choice, the things criminal justice, things that conservatives, people of faith, We're the ones who believe in people.
We're the ones that actually believe in the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness because we believe that God has given each a unique giftedness to do things and it's not the government's role to stifle that.
Faith and Freedom is one of the foremost reaching out, the grassroots, the bottom line, looking at these issues.
For people who, strangely enough, may know Ralph Reed, but they don't know Faith and Freedom or how they're working, or maybe they're in a state in which that movement is still growing, how do people reach out to Faith and Freedom?
How do you find out more about what's going on?
And of course, we're going to be back on later in another day talking about some of these other issues, but I wanted to give you just a few minutes to talk about Faith and Freedom.
Sure.
Well, I founded Faith and Freedom in 2009 after Barack Obama beat us so badly that it looked like a Harlem Globetrotters basketball game.
And we were the pick-up team that was there to lose.
And they completely out-hustled us on the ground, Doug, the 2008 Obama campaign.
I knew we were going to lose and lose badly.
When I got a call from a good friend of mine who lived in Akron, Ohio, in that band of counties that stretches from Cleveland East, and he called me and said, I just got my second door knock visit at the door from an Obama organizer with a clipboard, and I'm a Republican primary voter, and I know they know it.
And I went, wow, they've knocked on every door and visited every Democratic primary voter, then they've gone to all the swing voters, all the independent voters, now they're going to Republican voters.
So I started Faith and Freedom to give us that kind of maximization of turnout among our core voters, which are voters of faith, both pro-life, faithful Roman Catholics, and evangelical Christians.
Doug, those two together, the evangelicals are roughly 27% of the electorate.
It goes up or down depending upon the election, but it's roughly 27%.
Faithful, frequently mass-attending Catholics are, again, rough number, goes up or down.
It's about 10% of the electorate.
So you're looking at 37% of the entire electorate.
It's the biggest single constituency, bigger than the minority vote, the union vote, and the gay vote combined.
And it's over half the Republican vote.
And we now have two and a half million members and activists involved in the organization, over a million small donors.
We have full-time staff in about 14 states now, state organizations in about 30 states, and if people want to find out how they can get involved and how they can make sure that the values that you and I share are represented in the civic arena and in public policy and and if people want to find out how they can get involved and how they can make sure that the values that you and I share are represented in the civic arena and in public policy and that Christians have an effective voice in government, they
We're going to knock on, by the way, Doug, in 2022, a minimum, a minimum of 8 million doors in 21 states.
There has never been an effort on the center-right, outside of the Republican Party, of that magnitude in our lifetimes.
And it's only going to get bigger.
Folks, you've got to call, especially for conservatives who want to be a part of the arena, people of faith who said, how do I blend my faith and blend that into my civic engagement?
Faith and Freedom offers an opportunity for you to see that up front, get involved, and again, get involved where it matters, learning from the ground up, and this is what these folks will give you the tools to do.
Ralph, it's great to have you on the show today.
I'm going to get a promise from you.
It's not going to be the last time because I want to come back in and discuss some of these, especially these issue-based.
We could spend a whole time just on what matters to people and how we can communicate that better, especially around education and what we've seen happen over the last few years.
But Ralph, thanks a bunch.
I look forward to seeing you around soon, and I know our listeners appreciate it as well.
Doug, always a pleasure.
Enjoyed working with you in office since then, and I think you're one of the finest public servants our state has produced in recent years.
Keep the faith, friend.
I appreciate it, Rob.
Thanks so much.
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