On January 3, 1965, CHQ Chairman Richard A Viguerie launched his direct marketing company based on the insight that he could bypass the Left leaning mass media of TV, radio and major newspapers, and use the techniques of commercial direct mail to mobilize the hundreds of thousands of small donors who had supported conservative icon Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign for President to support other conservative causes and candidates.
The 12,500 hand-copied three-by-five index cards with the names and addresses of Goldwater donors gathered from the records of the Secretary of the Senate formed the basis of a list that would eventually grow to millions and power the foundation of new conservative organizations, such as Gun Owners of America and Gun Owners of California, The Conservative Caucus, Senator Jesse Helms’ Congressional Club, the National Conservative Political Action Committee, the Free Congress Foundation, various pro-life organizations, the Moral Majority, and dozens of other organizations and candidates that became known as the “New Right.”
Mr. Viguerie’s insight that the political interests of Goldwater donors, gun owners, culturally conservative Christians, opponents of abortion, small government and national defense conservatives, tax reformers, etc. all converged, and through the non-traditional media of direct mail, could be fused into a political movement, would create a new political ecosystem that won groundbreaking elections throughout the 1960, 70s and 80s.
For example:
1978 Democrats Retired Replaced by a Republican:
Muriel Humphrey (Minnesota, special election to finish the term of Hubert Humphrey; interim appointee who did not run) — Seat gained by Republican David Durenberger.
James Eastland (Mississippi) — Seat gained by Republican Thad Cochran.
James Abourezk (South Dakota) — Seat gained by Republican Larry Pressler.
1978 Defeated (lost primary/renomination or general election):
Floyd Haskell (Colorado) — Lost general election to Republican William L. Armstrong.
Dick Clark (Iowa) — Lost general election to Republican Roger Jepsen.
William Hathaway (Maine) — Lost general election to Republican William Cohen.
Wendell R. Anderson (Minnesota, regular election) — Lost general election to Republican Rudy Boschwitz.
Thomas J. McIntyre (New Hampshire) — Lost general election to Republican Gordon J. Humphrey.
Notable Republican gains from Democrats in 1978 included Colorado, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota (both seats), Mississippi, New Hampshire, and South Dakota.
en.wikipedia.org
1980 Elections Republicans gained a net of 12 seats (flipping control of the Senate from 58–41 Democratic to 53–46 Republican, plus 1 independent). This was driven by Reagan’s coattails, primary losses, and defeats of several prominent Democratic incumbents.
1980 Democrat Defeated (lost primary/renomination or general election):
Donald Stewart (Alabama) — Lost renomination; seat gained by Republican Jeremiah Denton.
Mike Gravel (Alaska) — Lost renomination; seat gained by Republican Frank Murkowski.
Richard Stone (Florida) — Lost renomination; seat gained by Republican Paula Hawkins.
Herman Talmadge (Georgia) — Lost general election to Republican Mack Mattingly.
Frank Church (Idaho) — Lost general election to Republican Steve Symms.
Birch Bayh (Indiana) — Lost general election to Republican Dan Quayle.
John Culver (Iowa) — Lost general election to Republican Chuck Grassley.
John A. Durkin (New Hampshire) — Lost general election to Republican Warren Rudman.
Robert Burren Morgan (North Carolina) — Lost general election to Republican John Porter East.
George McGovern (South Dakota) — Lost general election to Republican James Abdnor.
Warren Magnuson (Washington) — Lost general election to Republican Slade Gorton.
Gaylord Nelson (Wisconsin) — Lost general election to Republican Bob Kasten.
Republican gains in 1980 included Alabama, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Dakota, Washington, and Wisconsin. No Republican seats were lost.
Later, Leftist academics and political thinkers would coin a new term for their own version of a similar political convergence – intersectionality – the idea that the political interests of all allegedly oppressed groups; the poor and working class, racial minorities, homosexuals, environmental alarmists, women oppressed by the “patriarchy” and others whom society allegedly “marginalized” all intersected on the Left and they should work together to overthrow the existing order.
The political ecosystem of the New Right was underpinned and worked largely because it used direct mail to by-pass the Left leaning mass media and go directly to donors and voters, not just with appeals for money and support, but with news and information that recipients weren’t going to get from network TV and radio or the New York Times, the Washington Post or their local establishment newspaper.
That new form of communication came directly into the home of the audience, but the New Right political movement also had a strong personal communication element – through churches mostly, but to a lesser extent clubs and organizations that had local chapters – to create social permission to be conservative in a mass media world dominated by the Left.
The New Right political movement ran its course for reasons far beyond this short article to be replaced on the Right by the Tea Party Movement, which has been largely subsumed by the Make America Great Again, or MAGA, Movement.
Unlike the New Right and the Tea Party Movement, both of which created organizations and political infrastructure, the MAGA Movement has no infrastructure; it has been powered, not by communications with individuals by-passing the Left leaning mass media, but by the personality of Donald Trump and his use of mass media to broadcast his rallies and social media commentaries.
The Left, on the other hand, took an entirely different route. With a vast array of interests to organize, and without a compelling national figure around whom to organize, the Left has concentrated on forming local interest groups operating outside the Democratic Party, but nevertheless in alliance with it.
Environmentalists and “environmental justice” are big ones, advocates for illegal aliens, radical feminists, LGTBQ++, there are Leftwing organizations for even the smallest interest group, such as the parents of homosexual or allegedly transgender children, that “intersects” with other oppressed groups has been pulled into the coalition.
Local unions, especially teachers’ unions and government employee unions, such as the NEA, SEIU, and AFSCME, also play an outsized role.
And, unlike the Right, that relies largely on small donors, the Left has a solid base of Leftist billionaires, and the infrastructure they have created through such organizations as Arabella Advisors, the United Democracy Alliance (UDA), , Renew to Thrive (R2T), the Open Society Policy Center Inc. and various other Soros-related funds and organizations, the Omidyar Network, Neville Singham, the Democracy Fund, National Philanthropic Trust, and a host of other donor-advised funds and foundations, to fund its technology and day-to-day operations.
The result of that decades-long effort has been the creation of thousands of local Leftwing activist organizations, organized around every imaginable interest that “intersects” on the Left.
CHQ Chairman Richard A Viguerie conducted a study through which he determined the Left had at least 20,000 single-issue nonprofits vs. about 1,500 for conservatives.
Most importantly, each of those organizations has its own leadership, membership and donor base placing trained paid Leftwing activists in literally every corner of America.
Unlike most local organizations on the Right, which rely on volunteers, the fulltime job of those individuals – indeed in many cases their entire personas – revolve around Leftwing activism, especially on getting voters registered and to the polls.
And, not only do they relentlessly push their views and activism to their friends, family and those with even the vaguest interest in their issues, they have focused on using the technology of relationship marketing to build those relationships into a powerful political force.
In her Democracy files drops of behind the scenes conversations between Leftist leaders involved in planning the overthrow of the Trump government, Jennica Pounds (@DataRepublican Democracy Files Part 16) maps 178 NGO, labor, faith, legal and data entries behind the 2026 Democratic turnout push and its “19M for 19M” target.
And they didn’t use the mass media to do it, although obviously having a sympathetic Leftwing establishment media on their side helps, they used technology that was entirely independent of the mass media.
While Texas and other Red States were being targeted and taken, the Republican Party and the Trump team, were stuck in the old paradigm of a campaign conducted only during the election season and driven by mass communications – TV and radio broadcasting Trump’s rallies and remarks.
Instead of making media consultants rich, the Left was and is focused on three things: identifying and registering sympathetic voters and getting them to the polls.
And they can and did use tax-advantaged charitable nongovernment organizations to do it.
Our friend Col. Rob Maness broke it down well in a post to his website:
The target came first. The records she [@DataRepublican] published show Tory Gavito of Way to Win telling Inside Philanthropy in February 2025: "That's why our LLC is launching our new 19M for 19M Campaign." The 19 million were people who voted in 2020 and stayed home in 2024. In a follow-up post she was blunt: "NGOs had a very explicit goal of turning out 19 million people in 2026 who did not vote in 2024."
Then came the budgets. Her video documents a $27 million MoveOn program announced May 28, 2026. It documents AFSCME's political fund raising $41.3 million by June 30, against $29.9 million at the same point in 2022. It shows the MacArthur Foundation committing $100 million to democracy work "with an eye toward November's elections," with $34.25 million itemized across seven grants.
Full post through this link https://www.robmaness.com/2026/11/democracy-files-part-16-19-million-targets-178-groups-and-a-donor-supply-line/
For years CHQ Chairman Richard A Viguerie and his team have been beating the drum, largely to no avail, trying to get conservative churches and charities to engage in perfectly legal election-related activities, see our CHQ article Organizing for Victory Over The Crazy, Dangerous, Anti-God, Anti-American, Elite, Big Government Socialists, Communists and Islamists for just the latest example, the Left has built an entire ecosystem around doing exactly that.
All too many conservatives are looking for answers to the 2026 midterm disaster that do not lay responsibility for the defeat at their failure to adapt. But the bottom line is that conservatives used to know how to do what the Left has now made a fulltime job – building new single-issue organizations, organizing the disparate organizations into an effective coalition, using them to register voters and build enthusiasm, and then turning out their adherents on election day to vote for conservative candidates.
Conservatives have one job between now and Election Day 2028: Build or rebuild our own NGO network capable of doing what the Left just did. If we don’t, we’re going to have a very difficult time taking back our country and keeping the flame of American constitutional liberty burning.
PS: Don’t despair, you are not starting from scratch. Tea Party Patriots Action has a model relationship marketing tool, if every conservative church in America loaded their membership list in it we’d never lose another election. Contact them and ask how your local conservative NGO can get connected with TPPA and connect to Numinar.
George Rasley is editor of Richard Viguerie's ConservativeHQ.com and is a veteran of over 300 political campaigns, including every Republican presidential campaign from 1976 to 2012. A member of American MENSA, he also served as a precinct election official during numerous election cycles.
