Priebus: Focus on mundane tasks will win election

MILWAUKEE — Wisconsin delegates to the Republican national convention were told Thursday to be obsessed with the boring details of winning an election.

That advice came from Reince Priebus, the chairman of the convention’s host committee, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, the former chief of staff to former president Donald Trump and the former chairman of the Republican Party of Wisconsin. In other words, Priebus is qualified to hand out election advice.

“We have to be excited about the boring stuff,” Priebus said during a breakfast meeting for Wisconsin delegates. “It’s not about the candidate crazy nonsense.”

To make his point, Priebus laid out how so-called boring process details help win elections.

“We have 10,000 data points on everybody out there. We identify those with a 90 percent chance of voting for our candidate,” he said. “In this example, we send her an application for an early voting ballot, she doesn’t fill is out, so we go knock on her door.

“She turns in the application, but does not turn in the ballot,” Priebus said. “So, we go knock on her door again and get her to turn in the ballot. Then we verify that her ballot has been received. Now she off the list.”

That process needs to be done thousands of times, Priebus said.

“That’s how you identify 25,000 new voters,” he said. “We’re not running against idiots. This is a lot of boring stuff, but we have to get excited about it to win this election.”

The Priebus message about focusing on boring stuck with delegate Bob Kordus of Lake Geneva.

“I think he was dead on,” Kordus said. “That boring process is necessary to establish a strong turnout of early voters. I agree that we can’t start out 100,000 votes short and hope to overcome that in 13 hours on election day.”

Republican Party of Wisconsin Chairman Brian Schimming echoed Priebus’ focus on what was described as a boring but necessary process.

“The Democrats are in the middle of a crisis,” Schimming said. “But their crisis is not our win

“If I hear someone say we have already won, there’s Froedtert Hospital nearby where they can go to have my boot removed from their backside. We can’t have that attitude,” Schimming said. “We still have a long way to go.”