Scott Presler, the gay conservative political activist who took credit for helping Donald Trump turn Pennsylvania red, is now vowing to do the same in New Jersey.
The last time the Garden State voted for a Republican presidential candidate was in 1988, but Presler thinks the tides are turning.
With New Jersey’s gubernatorial race less than a year away, the controversial campaigner is on a mission to turn the blue state red.
“We are going to use the Pennsylvania model of voter registration and not reinvent the wheel, but just take all of those things we learned and apply them to New Jersey. And we’re going to play it smarter, not harder,” the founder of Early Vote Action PAC told Fox Digital.
“One of the biggest hurdles that we had going into the 2024 presidential is kind of getting conservatives to get on board with mail-in voting, with early voting, understanding our all of the above approach to ultimately trying to get Pennsylvania to swing in Donald Trump’s favor,” he added.
Trump spent years spreading baseless conspiracies about the supposed dangers of mail-in voting. He has called it “cheating” and “fraud” and even blamed his 2020 election loss on the long-standing democratic practice.
But on the campaign trail, Presler previously told The Independent his tactic was “about winning” when asked how his mail-in ballot campaign can exist alongside Trump’s claims of fraud. “I will do whatever it takes, legally and lawfully, in order to win,” he said.
Presler, originally from Virginia, is not your average Trump activist. With his signature long brown hair, his Instagram profile shows him posing in pictures with the president-elect, and as recently as yesterday, his daughter-in-law Lara Trump.
He describes himself as a former Eagle Scout and the son of a retired Navy Captain. He attended George Mason University in north Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C.
Before turning to politics, Presler said he previously worked as a dog walker and “was even the guy who returns the shopping carts [supermarket chain] Giant.”
His first political job was working to elect the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott. “Then, I spent 2 years of my life working to defeat Hillary Clinton & elect President Donald Trump,” Presler said.
He first gained a following as the organizer of nationwide “March Against Sharia” protests in 2017, and hit the headlines again in 2019 when Trump referred to a district of Baltimore as a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.”
“Life changed forever when President Trump brought attention to the city of Baltimore, Maryland. With 200 volunteers, we organized a cleanup & picked up 12 tons of trash in 12 hours,” Presler said.
He was invited to Trump’s Presidential Social Media summit in 2019 and was on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol during the attack by Trump supporters on January 6, which he described as “the largest civil rights protest in American history.”
The activist appears to have been noticed by Trumpworld again this year when he was invited to the stage by Lara Trump at the president-elect’s second appearance in Butler, Pennsylvania, the New York Post reported.
“We will protect your raw milk, your dairy, your farm, your school choice, your religious freedom, your ability to afford to have 10 beautiful children per family,” Presler told the crowd in Butler.
When he’s not campaigning, Presler enjoys the odd spa day, his Instagram profile shows, along with sharing AI-generated images of him as a Founding Father.
Presler said Trump’s success in Pennsylvania came down to targeting the right groups to register for early voting — hunters, frat boys, union workers, veterans, and the Amish.
It’s a tactic he plans to repeat for New Jersey’s gubernatorial race next November.
“In PA we went after truckers, and hunters and Amish and veterans,” Presler told Fox & Friends in an interview this morning. “In New Jersey we’re going to do the same thing.
“We’re going to the farmers markets and veterans of foreign wars halls, and you’ll see us at the beach and courting the trucker vote.”
