MAGA World Starts Turning on Trump’s Star Vote Getter

This gay, longhaired activist is famous for delivering Pennsylvania to Trump. But a former friend calls that a “delusion.”

Scott Presler addressing Turning Point Action’s “People’s Convention” on June 16, 2024 in Detroit. (Photo by Jeff Kowalsky/AFP via Getty Images)

MAGA Vote Kingpin Takes Heat

EVERY RIGHT-WING INFLUENCER needs a shtick. Scott Presler’s is that he registers tons and tons of new Republican voters. Whenever there’s a crucial election coming up, there’s a good chance Presler will be in the area, registering scads of new voters for the GOP—and posting about it. A lot.

Often, Presler advertises how he targets unique demographic groups, like truck drivers or the Amish. This has made him into a heroic figure on the right and earned him more than 2 million followers on X. Every time the RNC chair seat is open, Presler’s fanbase demands that he be appointed to run the party. The president’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump nearly did hire Presler to work for the RNC last year, until the resurfacing of an unsavory incident from Presler’s past in which he had sex in a Republican office, then posted the pictures on Craigslist. Presler is also gay, which made the incident a bit harder to land in GOP circles.

That colorful backstory hasn’t dimmed Presler’s star much, though. Last year, Elon Musk gave $1 million to Presler’s voter-registration PAC. Presler criss-crossed Wisconsin ahead of the state’s much-watched Supreme Court election in April, vowing that “the cavalry is on the way.”

But the cavalry failed to prevent a 10-point Republican defeat in that race. And since April, Presler has faced a growing chorus of Republican critics who say he is overstating the value of his voter-registration work, particularly in the battleground state of Pennsylvania.

Presler, contacted through his Early Vote Action PAC, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Presler’s most prominent critic on the right has been Brandon Straka, a former friend of his who made his own name on the right as the head of the “WalkAway” movement, which encourages traditionally Democratic groups like LGBTQ people and racial minorities to “walk away” and become Republicans.

Presler and Straka have a lot in common. They’re both gay, they both have hairstyles that are unusually dramatic for operatives of the staid GOP, and they both claim to have brought new demographics into the Republican party.

They were also both in Washington on January 6th. But while Presler spent the day hugging his fans on the streets of D.C., according to his social media posts, Straka egged on the mob at the Capitol and was sentenced to three years of probation for it.¹

Now the recipient of a presidential pardon, Straka has become an outspoken critic of Presler, claiming that he inflates his importance in a way that weakens Republican get-out-the-vote efforts. Straka calls it the “Scott Presler Early Vote Action delusion.”

“He has weaponized conservative apathy and told people, ‘Don’t worry about it, I have a magic wand and I’m going to come into your state, wave my magic wand, and turn it red,’” Straka said in an audio chat on X in May, adding, “If he could do it, why did he lose in Wisconsin in the Supreme Court election?”

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THE CLASH BETWEEN PRESLER AND HIS CRITICS is bigger than personalities. It’s about the fevered world of right-wing influencers seeking to position themselves as key to the party’s future—and whether anyone beyond Trump can take credit for GOP victories.

The 2024 election had seemed to quiet these debates. But they’ve revved back up with remarkable speed after Musk’s failed attempt to influence the Wisconsin Supreme Court race by flooding money into it. It raised the question of how valuable high-profile voter registration efforts actually are—or, more importantly, whether it’s election tactics or just Trump himself being on the ballot that is key for the GOP’s success.

Straka told me he grew suspicious over Presler, whom he calls a former friend, when he compared what he considers negative press coverage of his own efforts with the general positive press Presler receives. As an example, Straka pointed to a March profile of Presler in the Wall Street Journal that included a discussion of his hair regimen. (Presler describes his chest-length hair as “the brand.”)

“We’re treated very differently, and that makes me go, ‘Hmm, might there be a reason why the left-wing media is not maligning him, ever?’” Straka told me.

Presler’s critics have other, less superficial, criticisms. They’ve laid out their evidence that his impact is overstated at Real$cottPresler.com, a website launched in April devoted to their gripes with him. Brian Ference, a conservative investigative reporter who has promoted the website, characterized it to me as proof that Presler has “inflated” his claims about “the Amish numbers and dozens of other things.”

“The Amish voting was completely inconsequential to the election results,” Ference told me.

Ference noted that while Presler has made much of the power of the Amish vote to deliver Pennsylvania for Trump, the state’s main Amish county, Lancaster County, saw Trump’s vote total increase by only 6,000 votes between 2020 and 2024.

In a state where Trump won by roughly 120,000 votes in 2024, that’s not nothing. There are other examples that critics trot out as evidence of Presler’s hype efforts. They note that he rejoiced in September after registered Republicans surpassed Democrats in Pennsylvania’s Luzerne County.

“This is monumental, earth-shattering, ground shaking news,” Presler wrote on X.

But as Presler’s detractors on the “Real$cottPresler” website point out, Trump won the county even when it had more registered Democrats—by 22,000 votes in 2020.

Presler’s critics also say Presler has been slow to debunk a popular claim circulated by his fans: that he registered 180,000 Amish voters in Pennsylvania. That’s a statistical impossibility: The total Amish population in the state is less than 100,000.

“There’s not one single photograph of that?” Straka said on an X Space in May. “There’s not one picture of a 6′ 7″ guy with hair down to the floor, transporting tens of thousands of Amish people to the polls? But people write it, over and over and over again. It’s literally insane.”

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LIKE MUCH IN THE MAGA MOVEMENT, tactical or even philosophical disagreements are often just cover for more catty disputes. And Straka has been clear that he has personal grievances with Presler.

He claims that Presler joined him as part of a coalition of influencers rallying voters ahead of the 2020 election, with the understanding that all of the personalities involved would repost each other’s content. Instead, Presler benefited from his collaborators’ shares but refused to boost everyone else’s videos in kind, according to Straka. The result was both that Presler seemed to have an outsized impact on voting efforts and that Straka was left aggrieved.

Worse, Straka claims Presler used their friendship to get a plum front-row seat at the Ellipse rally that preceded the January 6th riot, only to abandon Straka when the latter faced federal charges for his actions that day.

While Presler has kept mostly quiet in the face of the attacks, he seemed to allude to them in a late May post, arguing that his critics were out to undermine his efforts to turn Pennsylvania red because he represents a threat to the political establishment.

“A Lot of People Have Been Attacking Me and I Figured Out the Reason Why,” Presler wrote on X on May 28.

Perhaps the strangest part of this saga concerns Presler’s accent. In that May live chat with Straka on X, anti-voter fraud activist Mark Cook claimed that in a heated moment after he accused Presler of ignoring election fraud, Presler confronted him with a “very, very crazy deep accent that was not his normal voice.”

This may seem like a truly inconsequential element in a feud involving millions of dollars in GOP get-out-the-vote resources, but it has nevertheless become one more data point as to the distrust and fractious nature defining the world of MAGA influencers.

Straka even took to Rumble in May to post a video denouncing Presler, during which he pointed out that while his erstwhile friend grew up in Florida and Virginia, he sometimes puts on an exaggerated Midwest accent straight out of Fargo.

“What was even more off the wall—Scott was now speaking with a bizarre accent,” Straka said, playing the accent footage. “At first I thought he was kidding, but he wasn’t.”

1. Readers outside of MAGA-land may remember Straka as the January 6th defendant who dressed up in an orange jumpsuit and posed for some weird pics with Marjorie Taylor Greene.