TAMPA, Fla. - Longtime evangelical leader Ralph Reed has begun work on a massive effort to push 1.7 million Christian voters to the polls for Mitt Romney, a campaign he predicts will "change the outcome of this election."
Reed spelled out his grassroots effort before conservatives gathered at the Republican National Convention. Citing statistics that some nine million evangelical and eight million Catholics did not vote in 2008, Reed said his group the Faith & Freedom Coalition will soon start targeting voters in Colorado, Iowa, North Carolina, Nevada, Ohio, Florida and Virginia.
He said that Faith & Freedom has a voter list of 17.3 million voters in 15 key states, and cellular phone numbers and emails for 35 percent of those, which it plans to tap to encourage evangelicals to both register to vote and go to the polls.
He outlined an effort that includes robocalls from Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee, a massive mailing, door hangers and a mammoth email campaign. "We're going to send up to 15 emails until they open them. And if they haven't opened their email, we're going to show up at the door and log into their laptop and help them open them," he said at a meeting of conservative leaders hosted by Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform