Every two or four years, Republican county committees across America hold organizational meetings.
They elect chairs. They approve slates. They make speeches about unity and new direction and building the infrastructure to win.
And then they lose.
Not everywhere. Not always. But in the suburban counties that decide national elections, in the Philadelphia collars and the Atlanta exurbs and the Phoenix rings, the pattern is consistent. The machine protects itself. The grassroots gets pushed out. And when the votes come in without Donald Trump at the top of the ticket, there is nothing there.
Chester County, Pennsylvania is not a unique story.
It is a case study.
In June 2022, the grassroots came together and elected Raffi Terzian as chairman with 85% of the vote. He ran on unity. New leadership. A team-oriented approach. Decentralized decision making. He promised to move the party forward.
We believed him.
Here is what happened next.
2022
Mastriano lost Chester County in his bid for Governor.
Every competitive local race went Democrat.
The infrastructure that was supposed to be building, recruiting, turning out voters, and fighting for this county produced nothing outside of Trump-driven races.
2023
Democrats held the majority on the County Board of Commissioners. Again.
District Attorney: Democrat Chris de Barrena-Sarobe won 79,177 to 66,019. A 13,000 vote margin against a Republican challenger in a county race.
Sheriff: Democrat Kevin Dykes won 79,305 to 65,898. Another 13,000 vote margin.
Every countywide contested race. Gone.
Over 30,000 mail-in ballots were counted in that election. The same mail-in ballot infrastructure the grassroots had been warning about for years. The same infrastructure the party establishment embraced while trying to push out the people raising alarms.
The one Republican sitting on the Board of Commissioners holds a seat the Democrats cannot legally take from him. It is written into the structure of county government. It is not a win. It is a consolation prize baked into the rules.
2024
Donald Trump was on the ballot.
Chester County still went to Kamala Harris 56% to 43%. Trump lost this county by 13 points while winning Pennsylvania.
Dave McCormick lost Chester County by 11 points in a senate race he won statewide.
Trump carried the ticket. Without him at the top there is nothing. No infrastructure. No ground game. No wins.
That is not a candidate problem. That is a structural failure four years in the making.
2025
Higher turnout. Same result.
Total ballots cast in Chester County climbed from 144,439 in 2021 to 196,724 in 2025. Turnout went from 38.83% to 50.98%.
Democrats won every single contested countywide row office anyway. Controller. Coroner. Clerk of Courts. Treasurer. Every one. By roughly 50,000 votes each.
The votes came in. Republicans lost them all by landslides.
2026
Now David Buckta is running for chair. His platform points to 2025 as proof the strategy is working. He claims the committee increased Republican turnout by 12.1% over 2023.
That number deserves scrutiny.
2023 and 2025 were not the same ballot. 2023 featured District Attorney and Sheriff. 2025 featured Controller, Coroner, Clerk of Courts, and Treasurer. Different offices, different cycles, different voters motivated to turn out.
The honest comparison is 2025 versus 2021. The same four row offices, on the same four-year cycle, decided by the same electorate facing the same choices.
Turnout went up. Republicans lost everything anyway.
What we learned specifically last night at one of the regional meetings was that they targeted 23,000 low propensity voters. Only 7,000 of those targeted voters showed up.
That is not what a successful GOTV strategy looks like. That is what a structural failure dressed up in talking points looks like.
Zero countywide wins in four years that weren’t structurally guaranteed.
That is Raffi Terzian’s record.
But the losses are only part of the story.
Look at what happened to the organization itself under four years of this leadership.
County committee meetings that were open to the public and press for decades, open to foster transparency and ensure the bylaws were followed, are now closed.
For decades the headquarters building was open during regular business hours. Committee members could walk in, pick up campaign materials, volunteer for tasks, get information. Now the building is closed and dark more than it is open and active.
On June 11, RCCC sent committee members a notice about the Organizational Meeting. It states plainly that the meeting “will be a closed meeting. Media is not permitted. Recording is not permitted.”
The meeting where this county elects its next chair will happen behind closed doors. No press. No recording. No record beyond whatever the people in the room choose to share afterward.
The doors closing was not just literal. Committee members who offered to help have had those offers declined because of who they associate with. People have been told, as committee members, that they do not have a right to speak freely or to associate with whoever they choose. The word used for those people is malcontents. Most of us call it the grassroots.
Chester County has a wealth of talent that has gone unused for four years because of this. That is not a strategy. That is a closed door, twice over.
Now look at who is running to replace Raffi.
David Buckta’s proposed executive team includes Paula Tropiano as Vice Chair and Barbara Spall as Treasurer.
Those names should be familiar. They are the same officers from Raffi’s original 2022 slate.
This is not new leadership. This is Raffi’s third term with a different name on the door.
And Buckta’s platform leans on mail-in ballot expansion as a core GOTV strategy.
Pennsylvania’s mail-in system isn’t California’s. Ballots here must be received by Election Day, with narrow exceptions for military and overseas voters. That distinction matters.
What doesn’t change is this. Pennsylvania has no chain of custody law for mail-in ballots. None. The SAVE Act would close that gap, and it has overwhelming support among Republican voters everywhere. Everyone supports it. Everyone except, it seems, the people running this committee, who have made no public push for it as a priority.
If election integrity is going to be more than a talking point, that is where the fight belongs.
The grassroots women and men who stood in parking lots and church halls and community rooms. Who taught themselves state and federal election law from scratch. Who filed lawsuits and Right to Know requests pro se, without lawyers, without funding, and without the party infrastructure that was supposed to be fighting this fight beside them.
That talent and that energy were treated as a liability instead of an asset. Candidates were told to stay away from us. Doors that used to be open were closed.
We are still here. And the question for June 23 is whether the next four years look the same, or whether this committee finally treats its own people as a resource instead of a risk.
This is where Chester County becomes a national story.
Because what Buckta is proposing is exactly what is happening in Republican county committees from coast to coast. The same faces. The same losing strategies repackaged with new language. The same machine asking to keep running while pointing to presidential coattails as proof it works.
It doesn’t work. The suburbs are being lost in every off-year cycle across America. And the people who have been sounding the alarm about why are still being pushed out of rooms while the consultants collect their checks.
Understanding how Trump built coalitions of volunteers could save this party. The question every committee member should be asking David Buckta on June 23 is simple.
Are you willing to invite the grassroots back to the table?
Because closing the headquarters, locking down the email list, shutting the meetings, and running the same slate that presided over four years of losses is not a coalition. It is a fortress.
And fortresses do not win elections.
There is also the matter of equal access.
On the morning of June 9 I sent a simple question to David Buckta and RCCC Headquarters.
Will other candidates considering running for chair be afforded the same communication opportunities as Mr. Buckta, with access via email to all elected committee members?
The first response came unsigned. It did not answer the question. It instructed interested candidates to declare their candidacy by emailing HQ.
I followed up. I asked again, directly. Will candidates who declare be given the same access to the committee member email list that Mr. Buckta had when he sent his platform?
This time I got an answer, signed by Barbara Spall.
The committee member email list is confidential and will not be provided. Any materials a candidate wants distributed must be sent to RCCC headquarters, and headquarters will forward them to the committee.
Think about that for a second.
The list was confidential when I asked about it. It was apparently not confidential when Mr. Buckta used it to send his platform to every committee member directly.
And going forward, if any candidate wants their platform to reach those same committee members, it has to pass through the hands of Barbara Spall first. The same Barbara Spall who is on Mr. Buckta’s proposed slate as Treasurer.
Any candidate is being asked to hand their campaign materials to a member of one slate’s leadership and trust that they will be “shared with the committee promptly.”
That is not equal access. That is a checkpoint.
And checkpoints are not new here.
This is the same committee that spent the last several years deciding who gets to speak, who gets endorsed, who gets access to resources, and who gets quietly frozen out. The town halls candidates were warned away from. The volunteers who were told their help wasn’t wanted, either directly or by ignoring their offers. The committee members told they didn’t have a right to associate with whoever they chose and faced threats of expulsion for supporting a different primary candidate ahead of an election, a use of our own removal rule that sits uneasily with a process that is supposed to let committee members and voters choose among candidates in the first place.
I documented that purge in detail. And it is happening everywhere.
The checkpoint described above is not an isolated incident. It is the same playbook, applied to a chair candidate instead of a volunteer.
The June 23 organizational meeting is less than two weeks away.
Every committee member who votes that day should ask one question.
If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results, what do you call four years of losses followed by a platform that doubles down on everything that produced them, put forward by a slate that is functionally the same team that presided over every single one?
We were promised unity in 2022.
We got a record that speaks for itself.
And across America, in every suburban county like this one, where Republicans lose whether or not the top of the ticket is competitive, the same promise is being made.
The same record is being produced.
The question is whether anyone is paying attention this time.
Chester County is.
We tried to tell you years ago.
We are still here.
The full documented record of what this grassroots has been fighting and what it has cost us personally to fight it lives in the archive.
We Told You. Now Watch Them Count.
When the GOP Turns on Its Base
They Aren’t Weak. They’re Traitors.
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