Crisscrossing a Winter Storm: Alabama, Virginia, and Back Home to Wisconsin

Friday night’s all-nighter to wrap up a strong week across Alabama flowed straight into the first of four flights on Saturday — all to get to, and back from, a day-long celebration of life in Virginia for the late, great John Backus, alongside many of us who once worked for him.

By the time the fourth flight landed at 11:36 p.m. Saturday, after crisscrossing winter storms that plunged more than 200 million Americans into dangerous ice, snow, and travel disruptions, it was already time to shift focus once again — this time to our Wisconsin team’s final push to prepare for Pastor Lorenzo Sewell’s event, just a mile from the Milwaukee airport, this coming Thursday.

Each of these three efforts was important enough to justify an all-nighter and navigating a dangerous storm. Still, you may only be interested in one of them — so feel free to skip ahead to whichever section matters most to you:

➡️ Scroll to: “Alabama-Based Teams at the State Legislature and Across the State”

➡️ Scroll to: “John Backus: A Celebration of Life and the Mentor at the Center of My Mt. Rushmore”

➡️ Scroll to: “Back to Wisconsin: Final Prep for Thursday’s Salt & Light Event” (RSVP)

Alabama-Based Teams at the State Legislature and Across the State

Over the course of several days, members of our team met with many voters across the state as well as a wide cross-section of Alabama legislators, walking through what disciplined grassroots outreach to learn from the people looks like.

Those meetings culminated in a photo at the Alabama Capitol that captures both relationships and outcomes: several of our team leaders standing alongside Senate President Pro Tem Garlan Gudger (2nd from right), Freedom & Family Action Chair Randy Brooks (3rd from left), and — fittingly — the two bookends who won their first elections by hitting thousands of doors so they knew what their constituents – not special interests wanted in their elected officials. I still remember being amazed back in 2010 at how many thousands of doors State Senator April Weaver hit as the gal who was supposed to come in 4th place behind the three guys. Instead April received more votes than all three of her opponents COMBINED to win the House seat before moving to Senate 10 years later! In 2018, Andrew Jones used the same playbook to win his State Senate – already having known the rural community as a farmer himself and balancing that by getting into towns to hit doors. Friday night I went to a birthday party/campaign event and HUNDREDS attended still taking to heart his “Andrew and You” campaign theme.

Members of Teams 1–3 listed below appear in that photo. Bios are also included on Teams 4–6 follow below, along with their photos and we include background on all six leader.

What makes this work possible — even during a winter storm — is that our Alabama-based teams don’t just visit the Capitol and leave. They meet with legislators, then immediately fan back out across the state to knock doors in places near their homes in Evergreen, Rainbow City, Opelika, and Selma, running meeting voters but also training people in each community to become surrogate listeners- not speakers.

Below is a snapshot of the team making that happen.

TEAM 1 – Holly Klucarich

Director of Strategic Engagement & Field Operations
Currently based in Rainbow City, Alabama, Holly sets the gold standard for disciplined, high-output voter contact. Her core team can deploy within 48–72 hours, routinely knocking 1,000+ doors per day while setting a professional standard from day one.

Her experience spans North Carolina, Texas, Arizona, Wisconsin, Virginia, and Alabama (where she lives), including:

A pivotal role in Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson’s reelection, where her Northern Wisconsin operation helped secure a razor-thin statewide victory
Oversight of the only Wisconsin Supreme Court effort in 2025 to improve its region by 7–10 points over the prior race — while the rest of the state stayed flat (documented in Restoration News)
Directing key field efforts for Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin’s 2021 victory

Holly’s leadership is grounded in real life: former mayor, school nurse, commercial realtor, and long-time church leader. On Week One of a project, she heads out from Rainbow City and arrives with five adult children who — like my own — began canvassing as home-schooled kids.

TEAM 2 – Alex Cucchiaro

Political Director
Based in South Alabama, Alex brings intensity, accountability, and rapid deployment capacity. He opens projects personally — hitting doors alongside two trusted friends — then builds outward as needed.

His background includes:

Managing high-stakes congressional field operations
Leading some of Florida’s strongest volunteer call programs
Serving as a Field Organizer for Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis Florida campaigns
Finishing #1 nationally in doors knocked among thousands of Faith & Freedom canvassers in 2024 (20,000+ personally from the time Kamala Harris entered the race to election day)

Alex also founded the Republican Club of Sunrise, helping build one of Broward County’s youngest and most diverse conservative leadership pipelines, that so changed Broward County and made Florida DEEP red.

TEAM 3 – Aubreigh Phillips

Youth Coordinator
Some people simply have it. Aubreigh is one of them.

We first met her when she was waiting tables at the Evergreen Waffle House while finishing high school. Her humor, instinctive people skills, and confidence were impossible to miss — including the moment she calmly informed us that another patron was “pretty sure” dead (even as he insisted otherwise), and said she’d “check again with her momma” and let him know if she was wrong and he was alive.

That story followed her all the way to the State Capitol, where legislators now greet her with:
“Wait — are you the Waffle House waitress?”

Since joining our team, Aubreigh has elevated youth organizing, canvassing discipline, and Capitol navigation — recruiting and motivating young conservatives while mastering professional door-to-door execution. We’re confident she’ll join a long line of early “Pudner finds” who went on to national leadership. Just this weekend while hitting doors many informed her they had just seen her video message to them that she and her friends were knocking in their area, and we stumbled upon the fact that her unofficial big sister Alex Dunn was the daughter of Alabama Farmers’ Federation County leader Steve Dunn, who Pudner told for years at Farmers Federation meetings that he would get Alex elected President of the United States.

TEAM 4 – Betsy Smith

Betsy leads trusted Alabama-based surge teams, especially valuable during deadline crunches or precision data work. Once the “big sister” organizing my own family’s nine-child canvassing operation when we would show up in a 15-seat passenger van and 10 of us would start knocking, she now balances motherhood with elite grassroots execution.

Her specialties include:

Converting handwritten data into usable campaign intelligence
Supporting rural and suburban turnout operations
Producing analysis that once stopped a major recall effort by exposing left-wing manipulation of a system to recall elected officials right before their normal election

She also brings elite athletic discipline, having competed nationally in soccer before earning a college scholarship.

TEAM 5 – Spencer LaVerde

Like Pudner, Spencer moved from the South to Wisconsin prior to the crucial Trump vs. Harris Wisconsin election, and he specializes in large-scale, disciplined voter engagement — supervising teams of 40+ canvassers during the 2024 Presidential, including managing payroll and logistics, and personally knocking doors to refine message and execution.

When Wisconsin projects pause, Spencer frequently heads back South.

TEAM 6 – Lars Wiechmann

Lars is one of the few strategists with experience comparable in scope and longevity to my own. He has hired and managed hundreds of canvassers across multiple states and is trusted to step in when margins are thin and accountability matters most. He does live a couple of hours from Alabama in South Carolina – but like Holly, went to Wisconsin to run a huge region in Wisconsin in Ron Johnson’s narrow last re-election and he can drive a couple of hours to setup in Alabama.

John Backus: A Celebration of Life and the Mentor at the Center of My Mt. Rushmore

From Alabama, I changed flights multiple times to make it to and from Virginia for one of the most remarkable celebrations of life I’ve ever attended — honoring John Backus, a legendary venture capitalist and the mentor who sits squarely at the center of my personal Mt. Rushmore.

John saw potential in me helping his high tech companies despite the fact that my experience was limited to politics and journalism — from writing manuals and RFP responses that helped sell the first home banking software, to crafting proposals that led to $10 million deals, to trusting me with managing operations across three state headquarters.

He once explained his investment philosophy to me this way as he launched Draper Atlantic in partnership with Tim Draper, who created many of the Silicon Valley billionaires:

“Seventy of the eighty companies I invest in won’t make it. I’ll lose $70 million on them. But the winners cover it — as long as I start by checking the founder’s credit score.”

I couldn’t believe that instead of calculations based on his Stanford business education that he started by reviewing the same credit scores that are used to allow a credit card to be issued, but he explained to me further. Honesty mattered more than brilliance. If someone was honest, they might fail — but if they were intentionally ripping you had no chance at a return on investment.

On another occasion another very well-known high tech guru was going into a key negotiation. I recall Coleman Andrews, who spoke at the Celebration of Life, said directly, “Oh no, Backus needs to handle negotiation or you might lose.” He said it with the conviction of someone saying, “Oh, your high school football team could lose their game Friday, so instead of taking a chance and starting Timmy, I convinced Tom Brady to play.”

At his celebration of life, I was able to share stories with his sons — including “Little John Backus,” a mere 6-foot-9, already a formidable negotiator who really has turned out “just like his Dad” — and laugh over the legendary double Big Gulp cup that made appearances in front of John at every meeting.

That Big Gulp was always a quiet bond for me due to my similar Diet Coke addiction, and tied back to one of my earliest writing mentors, Gail Perlick of the Wall Street Journal, who once identified my desk from thirty away at my newspaper in a town in which she had never been – because of a Big Gulp cup and stacks of notebooks — and left a “gift” when I wasn’t there.

John Backus didn’t just promote me. He demanded excellence. More than once, he circled back after a big assignment to add:

“I want to be clear — you will write something that ensures we win this proposal. Do you understand?”

Like last night, I didn’t sleep those nights – and would still be finishing the project when he returned the next morning.

That lesson — preparation enabling leadership — still guides my work today.

Now that he is in Heaven instead of negotiating deals on earth, I wasn’t giving away trade secrets when I told his sons and a future daughter-in-law about watching and realizing he was the greatest negotiator in the world. I watch him prep knowing that he had one – and only one – point he had to win in negotiations or hundreds of employees would lose their jobs.

He put down a list of a dozen or so items to discuss and one after another gave into the other company and they could not believe they had “out negotiated” the legendary John Backus on 12 consecutive issues. When he got to the 13th item and they balked he feigned outrage at having given in on a dozen items and threatened to call off the whole deal if they “humiliated him” by not giving in on even this one last item.

I could hardly breath knowing their answer would keep the jobs of hundreds of friends – and as always John won and we all kept receiving paychecks. That crucial moment we were all shocked because for one of the only times we ever saw him – John was not smiling until the deal was done. I remain in awe and in disbelief that he found anything in my background that made me a good Director of Operations in the corporate world for those three years – but he told me he would always find a way to match the skill set of “the best athlete” with a new position. RIP!