Pardon any typos as I send as I am leaving an inspirational 22nd annual prayer breakfast in Appleton WI to get back to Pentecost Mass this evening in Milwaukee and cap a weekend that included hundreds attending the Ice Cream Sunday launch of the Wisconsin Faith & Freedom Coalition while two new conservatives were elected to national spots:
Prayer Breakfast.
Governor Scott Walker (center in photo with Israeli flags) keynoted the first prayer breakfast in 2002, and was followed by the founder of National Faith & Freedom Ralph Reed, former Trump Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, Senator Ron Johnson and others over the years. Amazing Grace was sung by Tony Nasvik of Faith Wins (right in photo with Israeli flag) – who was the first President of the Wisconsin Faith and Freedom Coalition. I am holding up a small Israeli flag halfway between the two.
WI Faith and Freedom Coalition Kick-off event.
Hundreds attended the Wisconsin Faith & Freedom Coalition kick off event featured ice cream Sundaes on Friday night. I went from alcohol to sundaes years ago at southern conventions because a larger percentage of our faith-based voters did not drink. As of a 2020 study, 60 percent of evangelical voters did not drink.
However, launching the 2024 Wisconsin Faith & Freedom effort we are in one of the six states on the map below in which most conservative faith-based voters are either Catholic or Lutheran – where light social drinking is more common and in fact wine is part of communion at church. Being Wisconsin, there was alcohol within 30 feet of our kickoff, so we kept the focus on sundaes.
Congrats Pam and Terry on Elections!
In between these two great events, there were two very close elections for RNC Committeeman and Committeewoman. We ran estimates two weeks ago based on our surveys and talking to leaders on how 53 of the 72 counties would vote and calculated that Pam Travis and John Hiller would win the two spots on a second ballot since neither would get 50% on the first ballot.
John Hiller, who has long run advance for President Trump in addition to having been treasurer for Scott Walker, did not run, and Terry Dittrich (who our survey showed two weeks ago as 3% ahead one Hiller was out) won 53% to 47%. Pam did win the National Committeewoman spot on the second ballot 51% to 49% on the ballot I showed before. So contracts Pam and Terry!
I do try to avoid mixing messages from my two groups, since our effort to turn out faith-based voters is completely separate from the efforts at election reform for www.takebackaction,org, but I can’t help pointing out that if attendees had just been allowed to put a “1” but their first choice (instead of the check mark I put by Pam below) and a “2” by their second choice, then when Maripat Krueger finished 3rd place then the Chairs could have just taken a few minutes to see how many of her voters had a “2” by each of the other candidates to determine the winner – but instead we took another hour to all vote again between the remaining two and it all works out the same except for the voters who went home to Waukesha or where ever before voting in the 2nd round.
