Mother Jones illustration; Michael Swensen/Getty; Jeff Kowalsky/AFP/Getty; Getty
In August, former President Donald Trump called the billionaire Elon Musk “a super genius guy.” That “super genius” and his new America PAC have now taken over much of the Trump campaign’s swing-state ground game in the final weeks before the election. Since creating the PAC in April, Musk has infused it with nearly $120 million to try to get out the vote for Trump. But, as it turns out, winning a presidential election may not be as simple as colonizing Mars or wrecking Twitter—especially for a political neophyte.
Musk offered people money to register to vote and then subsequently got sued by the Philadelphia district attorney and warned by the Justice Department that the scheme is likely illegal. He hired an army of canvassers only to see many of them game a GOTV app to make it seem as if they had knocked on hundreds of doors, when, in fact, they may have been just sitting at Starbucks. And in late August, he made a $1 million donation to a political action committee founded by Scott Presler, a man who even the Republican National Committee has declined to employ because in 2016 he was allegedly caught having sex in an office the RNC shared with the Virginia GOP and posting photos of the encounter on Craigslist.
Over the past two years, Presler has been a fixture at local Republican party events across the country, where he often conducts voter outreach training. He was among the MAGA activists who helped depose Ronna McDaniel as chair of the Republican National Committee earlier this year for not doing more to hire people like…Scott Presler. When the former president’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump took over as RNC co-chair in March, one of her first moves was to announce her intention to bring on Presler to help with the party’s GOTV efforts.
Presler “is an amazing vote registerer,” Trump told Benny Johnson, host of the Tenet Media show In The Arena. (Tenet turned out to be a vehicle for Russian disinformation and has since disbanded.) “I think he’s fantastic. I want him on our legal ballot harvesting division.” Five days later, after old stories about Presler’s tenure with the Virginia GOP resurfaced, the RNC issued a statement saying that he would not be joining the party payroll and would remain “focused on his nonprofit.”
The founder of Early Vote Action, Presler moved to Pennsylvania earlier this year to flip the crucial swing state for Trump. He has been registering Republican voters among groups he believes are untapped reservoirs of Trump supporters like the Amish, truck drivers, and gun owners who just need a push. In early October, when Trump returned to the same Pennsylvania venue where he’d been nearly assassinated in July, Presler was awarded a speaking slot at the rally. The 6 foot 5 inch former head of “Gays for Trump” and QAnon conspiracy promoter told the assembled crowd, “To our beautiful Amish in Lancaster and across the state: we will protect your raw milk, your dairy, your farming, your school choice, your religious freedom … your ability to afford to have 10 beautiful children per family.”
Presler has promoted Qanon conspiracies and proved too controversial for the RNC. Musk just gave him $1 million.
Musk appears to be a committed Presler fan. He has amplified Presler’s social media posts, including some that featured conspiracy theories about the election. At an October town hall event in Pennsylvania, an audience member asked Musk if, as an adviser to Trump, he’d hire Presler in the next administration. “Absolutely, yes,” Musk said.
Musk’s donation to Early Vote Action was a pittance for someone who wasted more than $40 billion buying a chronically unprofitable social media site. But the million dollars was more than three times what Presler had previously raised for the PAC since its inception in December 2022. Federal elections records show that by the end of June this year, Early Vote Action had raised less than $350,000. Its largest donor at that point was the $50,000 contributed by Fight Like a Flynn PAC, started by Trump’s disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
The second-largest contribution of $20,000 came from Margaret Topper, a Florida woman who has been a regular donor to candidates who denied the results of the 2020 election, like Colorado’s former secretary of state Tina Peters, who was recently sentenced to nine years in prison for election interference. Presler was a prominent figure in the “Stop the Steal” movement in 2020. On January 6, he was outside the US Capitol, where he tweeted a video of the mob, calling it “the largest civil rights protest in US history.”
With an active online presence, Presler extensively documents his efforts to register voters on Trump’s behalf. Posts show him in the field, working booths at gun shows and county fairs, tossing his long, Fabio locks back as he announces his latest haul of voter registrations. Every week, he has posted new numbers showing that voter registrations in various Pennsylvania swing counties were trending red. But it’s unclear whether his curated social media narrative reflects real influence on the election in Pennsylvania.
When I told one local involved in politics in Pennsylvania that Musk had given Presler $1 million, he was shocked. “I don’t know what he’s done with it,” he told me.
Before receiving money from Musk, Early Vote Action’s biggest expenditures weren’t for campaigns or candidates but for fundraising and media consultants. The PAC paid about $50,000 to a Vermont-based fundraising company called Information Cataloging Strategies, and $30,000 to a media consultant named Roma Daravi who worked in the first Trump White House as the deputy director of strategic communications. Those same two vendors account for the biggest chunk of the new spending from Early Vote Action since receiving Musk’s donation.
The consultants seem to be doing their job in one regard: Presler has become a regular presence on right-wing media, which has been happy to endorse his work. And his fundraising has picked up as a result. His PAC has now raised nearly $3 million, including the donation from Musk. But whether all that media and money is moving any votes is still an open question. For instance, in late September, Presler declared that Republican voter registrations had overtaken those of Democrats in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. “IT IS DONE!” he declared on all his social media channels. “We flipped Luzerne County, Pennsylvania…This is monumental, earth-shattering, ground shaking news.”
But Presler’s efforts in Luzerne County may have no meaningful impact on the election. That’s because lots of registered Democrats in Luzerne County have long been pulling the lever for Republicans, especially for Trump. The former president crushed President Joe Biden in Luzerne County in 2020, 56 percent to 42 percent. The spread was even bigger in 2016 when Luzerne County voters went for Trump over Hillary Clinton by more than 20 points. Luzerne County “was voting that way for a while,” says Thomas Shubilla, chair of the Luzerne County Democrats. “There were people that were Democrats a long time ago that switched to Republican. It’s quite a purple county.”
When I told Shubilla that Musk had given Presler $1 million, he was shocked. “I don’t know what he’s done with it,” he told me. Shubilla says that he is out knocking on doors almost constantly in the county and he has seen very little evidence of any sort of Trump ground game there. “Very very very rarely do I see Trump literature anywhere” at the houses he visits that might indicate that a canvasser had stopped by and left some materials, he told me.
In Luzerne County, Presler can point to at least one specific success: gumming up the works at the local election board. For weeks, he’s complained online that the board had a huge backlog of unprocessed voter registration forms. He has urged his supporters to contact the board to complain about the log jam and also to pester staffers with unfounded claims that massive numbers of undocumented immigrants are registered to vote in the county. Presler has appeared at least twice at county election board meetings to demand answers to these questions, and then he posted the videos of his grandstanding before the board to his more than 2 million followers on social media.
Yet County Election Director Emily Cook told the local paper the Times Leader in late September that many of the new voter registration applications her office is receiving are either duplicates from people already registered or others who simply wanted to change their address or party affiliation. Cook also said that the understaffed board’s work had been slowed by an onslaught of people calling the office, many from outside the county, asking “scripted” questions about the registration backlog, immigrants, and whether the board had enough paper for the election. (In 2022, Luzerne County ran out of paper for ballots on Election Day.)
“These script questions are designed to take bureau employees away from processing applications to sow those seeds of doubt and create those problems they want to find,” Cook told the Times Leader.
Presler did not respond to a request for comment for this story, but Shubilla says Presler’s laser focus on voter registration, while a fine civic exercise, isn’t likely to have much of an impact. “What I’m doing is making sure our voters are voting on Election Day, returning their mail-in ballots by Election Day,” he said. “And that’s what’s going to win the election.”
That’s not just the view of the local Democrats. A longtime GOP political consultant who wished to remain anonymous told me that voter registration drives are notorious for collecting forms from people who are already registered. That’s because 30 years ago Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act, better known as the “Motor Voter” law that allows people to register at the same time they apply for a drivers’ license or public assistance. Even the Post Office now asks people who are submitting a change of address form if they want to register to vote.
“Everybody’s registered now because you can’t go anywhere without them sticking a voter registration form in your face,” the consultant said. And that includes the Amish, he noted. “A lot of them, they’re all registered,” he told me. “The question is turning them out. And what turns voters out is being motivated and excited about your candidate.”
Voters in the past two presidential elections have been pretty motivated, on both sides. The 2020 election had the highest turnout—66 percent—of any national election since 1900, and that figure was even higher in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, where almost 70 percent of the registered voters cast a ballot. Moving the needle, as the polls show, will require a lot more than a few voter registration changes.
Meanwhile, Musk’s Early Vote Action donation suggests that he’s failed to understand the most basic feature of Republican politics, namely its well-developed pool of sharks just waiting to take advantage of unsophisticated rubes with a lot of money. Musk wouldn’t be the first rich guy to get “taken to the cleaners” by opportunistic politicos, says the GOP consultant. “He’s a rookie. He’s gotta make rookie mistakes.”
