Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
At Sturgis, Trump supporter recruits voters
Biker backs president, uses rally to find allies
STURGIS, S.D. — It’s a Friday night at a crowded biker bar in South Dakota when Chris Cox, founder of Bikers for Trump, takes the stage. While many have come to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally for some combination of riding and partying, Cox’s focus is on something else — voting.
The coronavirus pandemic may have squashed most in-person get-out-the-vote efforts across the country, but Cox’s group remains unbothered by public health recommendations. As the Trump campaign struggles to gain momentum less than 90 days from the election, Bikers for Trump has taken advantage of recent motorcycle rallies to make direct appeals to register to vote.
While the group has gained a significant online following for its bravado in providing security at some Trump 2016 rallies, it remains to be seen if it can get bikers — many from the suburbs Trump is targeting — to show up at the ballot box.
To make his appeal, Cox enlisted scantily-clad female bartenders to join his nightly “Trump rallies” atop bars at One Eyed Jack’s Saloon. Most of the rallies consisted of reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and singing the national anthem. As members of the predominantly male audience removed their hats, one bartender who was topless except for a pair of strategically placed American flag stickers performed the Star-Spangled Banner in sign language.
“If you live in Wisconsin, North Carolina, Arizona, Ohio, Pennsylvania or Florida the campaign needs you to double-down because those are the states that we need to carry this thing,” Cox bellowed.
Cox’s list of battleground states contained a tacit acknowledgment that many places Trump carried in 2016 are now in doubt. But his praise for the president drew cheers, a display of Trump’s lasting favor among those who still see him as an outsider in defiance of the political elite.
“Trump tapped into all this fear and anger and frustration,” said Bill Thompson, a sociologist at Texas A&M University at Commerce who studies biker culture. “Man, he’s a master at whipping that up.”
Cox, who started the group in 2015, has shown a knack for generating political drama. He gained media attention during the 2016 election for assembling a quasi-security force at rallies and forming what he called a “wall of meat” to keep protesters from disrupting Trump’s inauguration. More recently, he has enlisted bikers to give Amish and Mennonite Trump supporters motorcycle rides to rallies in Pennsylvania.
Since the last election, Cox has tried to build Bikers for Trump into a political machine, registering a political action committee. Its Facebook group has more than 350,000 followers, and 180,000 people have signed up for a mailing list. Cox did not give numbers on how many had registered to vote.
Turning bikers into voters could prove difficult. Cox experienced that firsthand this year when his bid to represent South Carolina in Congress got less than 10 percent of the vote in the Republican primary.
“A lot of people want to participate, wearing T-shirts or maybe waving flags,” he said. “But the only way to really raise the bar and move the needle is to identify people who otherwise don’t vote and get them to vote.”
Chris Carr, the Trump campaign’s political director, urged members of the crowd at a rally Thursday to get their neighbors registered to vote.
“Chris Cox right here is a huge ally,” Carr said. “The president loves this man.”
But even at the Sturgis rally, where displays opposing Hillary Clinton were common in 2016, there was an undercurrent of exasperation with the president this year.
Phillip Geary, a rallygoer from Washington, strolled the streets in a “Make America Kind Again” T-shirt. He said that he had gotten fist bumps amid the leather-clad crowd, and someone even bought him lunch.
“I think there’s more sentiment against the president,” he said. “It’s just beneath the surface, beneath the facade.”