Precinct chairs play a significant role in the success of our GOP County Parties. Many remain unaware of the duties and the impact the position holds in working to achieve victory for our candidates. We must fill these seats with individuals who are politically active and engaged in the communities and their constituents and elected officeholders.
Attend, Participate, Vote.
One of the primary obligations of precinct chairs is to participate in their County Executive Meetings. These meetings conduct the business of the County GOP. Precinct chairs have to pay heed, experience, and partake at their CEC as they cannot delegate these meetings to another individual in your precinct. As a result of their absence, your precinct loses its vote and voice. In addition, precinct chairs have the privilege and opportunity to participate on committees that support Party efforts.
Convention Process
Serving as a convention chair is an excellent opportunity to educate your precinct‘s most dedicated members on matters related to Party Rules, Party Platform, and Party Leadership. Recruiting delegates to participate in this process is exciting, and everyone who seeks to be respectfully involved in the process in a manner that does not exclude. We need more young adults and people of different circumstances, backgrounds, and factions of the Party who share our core platform principles in a welcoming way through this process.
Inform, Engage, Activate.
It is essential for precinct chairs to be well-connected and well-established within the communities they were elected to represent. Actively attending local Party meetings, regularly volunteering on campaigns and charities, and staying up to date in a political arena that waits for no one is a fantastic way to get there. The ability to pass vital information to voters in your precinct is paramount to victorious turnout rates in elections. The reality is we have far more elections than the average resident is aware of, and sometimes the polling locations for these elections are not easily accessible to the public. In the year 2022, your precinct chair must understand technology, its rapid, never-ending evolvement, and how to utilize digital media to the benefit of sending clear, concise, and intelligent messaging that will keep voters informed with a call to action.
Invest. Get Out the Vote!
Being a precinct chair means that you will have to make sacrifices. Going from work to home so you can change clothes and head out the door to spend the rest of your evening at an executive meeting instead of dinner with family and a TV show might be a sacrifice you have to make. It might mean that instead of sleeping in on a Saturday, you will rather be block walking for our Republican nominees. It could mean spending your own money on resources and tools to help our candidates get their messages out to more voters.
Working Our Elections
Setting up a polling location requires a great deal of time and concentrated effort. You must begin setting up polling booths the night before and prepare yourself for an early morning of preparation and a long election night of packing up equipment. It is tiring but rewarding to be a part of our electoral process. One of my favorite highlights from the 2020 General Election was accompanying and assisting voters with disabilities so that they could cast their ballots with dignity and as much ease as possible.
What Can You Do to Make a Difference?
If your precinct has an existing chair, be sure to kindly reach out and ask how active they are in fulfilling their commitments, inquire how you can help them obtain their goals, and request information on the length of how long they plan to serve. Building a relationship with your chairman helps ensure your precinct is well-served and established to grow the Republican Party at the most local, grassroots level. Suppose your precinct chairman is focused on titles and management over leadership, or a stage presence over putting in the work, or is just too busy to ever respond to your call and message. In that case, it might be time to gently ask them to step aside so someone more dedicated to the cause can produce and deliver results on behalf of the precinct they sought but failed to generate.