Scott Kalb: The Far-Right Came for My Town
By Scott Kalb
As we brace ourselves for a consequential election this year, the American public is anxious for what’s to come. Worries about political extremism and threats to democracy have emerged as a top concern for U.S. voters, and rightfully so.
At the national level, the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, a multi-organizational effort spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation also known as Project 2025, has been busy laying the groundwork for an authoritarian administration under a second Trump presidency. Project 2025’s playbook, the so-called Mandate for Leadership, is a battle cry for “conservative warriors” to “dismantle the administrative state” department by department, limit democratic participation in our government, and facilitate authoritarian rule. While this MAGA-fueled national mandate is deeply concerning, we should not overlook systematic efforts at the hyper-local level to discreetly chip away at our democratic institutions.
There’s plenty of evidence that the national far-right playbook is already being implemented at the local level. Greenwich, Connecticut, where I serve as an elected official, would seem to be an unlikely candidate for this strategy, as it’s been run by centrist Republicans for almost 100 years.
And yet, last November, an extremist faction of the GOP known as the “Greenwich Patriots” submitted 100 hard-right candidates for election, in an effort to pack the local legislature and take control.
The effort backfired spectacularly. A bipartisan coalition, spurred on largely by a local group of highly engaged moms, countered this effort to manipulate the legislature by publishing a recommended list of moderate Republican and Democratic candidates, the majority of whom won seats in the election. But the Far Right is not going away – and they weren’t done with my community yet
In an attempt to overturn the results of this vote, the Chair of the Greenwich Republican Town Committee filed a complaint claiming that the election was illegitimate and fraudulent, a go-to tactic of MAGA extremists. In fact, over the last year, hard right leadership of the Greenwich Republicans tried to overturn the results of four elections that didn’t go their way, filed seven complaints, and most recently filed a lawsuit against the town’s Republican Registrar. They even solicited intervention from the Chief Counsel of the Republican National Committee (RNC) in a failed attempt to overturn a grant to upgrade local election infrastructure.
You would be wrong to dismiss this as a one-off conflict in a politically irrelevant, historically GOP enclave. Rather, it’s an example of a disturbing trend we’ve seen spreading across the nation since 2020.
Frustrated by their failure to overturn the presidential election, anti-democratic forces have been pursuing a troubling strategy to dismantle electoral safeguards at every level of government, including the hyperlocal municipal level, ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
Heavily promoted by Steve Bannon, the “precinct strategy” is a MAGA campaign aimed at swaying the hearts and minds of moms and pops in local American towns while systematically undermining their democratic rights. Fueled by right-wing funders and organized by extremist GOP leaders, these efforts to undermine democracy at the local level have been magnified by sympathetic social media platforms, as outlined in the Brennan Center’s Election Deniers Handbook.
Recent examples of anti-democratic activity abound in historically red states from political retribution in Florida to voting rights restrictions in Georgia and Texas, to promoting a failed supermajority ballot initiative in Ohio, installing election deniers to run local elections in Cascade and Ravelli Counties in Montana, and making threats against election officials in Arizona.
There’s a concerning trend of election denialism gaining momentum in blue strongholds too. From the Pennsylvania counties where officials in 2022 refused to certify legitimate election results, to New Hampshire where the Patriot Hub tried to ban the use of voting machines in 22 towns, to Adams township in Michigan where the town clerk and supervisor were removed for promoting election conspiracy theories, we have seen this pattern repeated over and over again throughout the country.
As a business leader and elected official, I am deeply concerned about efforts to tear at the fabric of our democracy at the national level, but I am equally alarmed by the concerted efforts of MAGA extremists to take over local Republican parties, spread misinformation, and overturn local election results. Our democracy starts at home, and we should not tolerate efforts to intimidate local officials, manipulate voting outcomes, and undermine confidence in elections.
We must stand united and make it clear that extremism and election denialism have no place in our towns and in our country.
Scott Kalb is the Founder and Director of the Responsible Asset Allocator Initiative at New America. A resident of Greenwich, CT, he serves on the Board of Estimate and Taxation (BET) and is a member of Leadership Now Project, a coalition of business leaders committed to renewing American democracy.
