How a long-haired gay giant helped Trump flip Pennsylvania red

PITTSBURGH — Scott Presler is a giant of a man.

Standing at 6’5″ and 200 pounds with 22 inches of long brown hair running down his back, the gay conservative political activist told The Post, “I’m a big boy.”

Presler proved himself to be something of a political titan too this year.

After losing Pennsylvania by some 80,000 votes in 2020, President-elect Donald Trump flipped the Keystone State red this November by 120,000. 

That’s due in no small part to Presler, whose nonprofit Early Vote Action put the Trump campaign’s “Swamp the vote” strategy into action in Pennsylvania, registering Republican voters and getting them to vote early, by mail, or “by whatever means necessary,” the group’s website reads.

“I didn’t invent the wheel. I just took the Democrats’ tools and used it to elect Republicans,” Presler snickered.

Presler founded EVA in the wake of the 2022 red wave that never came. This spring, he zeroed the group’s efforts on reclaiming Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes for Trump in 2024.

And the Virginia activist committed to the cause personally by buying a house in Beaver County to Pittsburgh’s west.

Leading a data-driven peak field staff of 74 and an army of volunteers making calls, writing postcards and knocking doors, Presler said his team registered 50,000 Republicans, flipped two longtime Democratic counties (Bucks and Luzerne) red by voter registration and increased Republican early voting by 10 points.

On Election Day, Trump retook Erie, Northampton, Monroe and Bucks counties, which went for Biden in 2020.

Presler was proud to show conservative “naysayers and doom-and-gloomers” skeptical of mail-in voting that Republicans could beat Democrats at their own game. 

And he revelled in their defeat.

“You’re going to hear Democrats say we didn’t have a ground game. Babe, we out-registered you every single week. We flipped your counties from blue to red. And we delivered the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for Donald J. Trump,” he said.

“Put the ‘babe’ in there. That’s important,” he added.

If you haven’t noticed, Presler is a personality.

The luscious mane, the cowboy boots, the V-neck revealing a hairy chest, Presler resembles at once Aragon of “Lord of the Rings” and a Founding Father, or so his more than 2 million social-media followers will have you believe. (Presler insisted The Post credit X user @6hsense for the best of the AI-generated renderings he shares on his X and Instagram accounts.)

Presler cultivates the mythos with his free-wheeling humor.

“I look so young and fresh that you would never know how old I am,” he said, refusing to give his age, though Wikipedia has narrowed it to 36 or 37.

He routinely posts selfie-style videos of him rallying volunteers — and recently riling up Republicans to condemn a Bucks County commissioner who admitted to illegally counting votes for Democratic Sen. Bob Casey.

This passion for provocation — organizing a “March Against Sharia” in 2017 and “Stop the Steal” protests claiming President Biden won the 2020 election by mass voter fraud — has fueled Presler’s political clout, which he says helped attract crowdfunding and even the attention of Elon Musk, who gave his political-action committee $1 million in August.

With a mind for what goes viral, it’s no surprise “Scott” trended on X for 13.5 hours when Trump won the election — the longest-trending search second only to “Latinos.”

But before Presler gained his notoriety, he walked dogs, unable to find a job after graduating from George Mason University during the Obama years.

Inspired by the conservative politics of his retired Navy captain father and wanting to “be the solution,” Presler volunteered on his first campaign in 2013 and fell in love with the sport, going on to help defeat Hillary Clinton in Virginia in 2016 and attend Trump’s Presidential Social Media summit in 2019.

“I went from the dog house to the White House,” he likes to say.

And Trumpworld took notice of Presler in 2024, with Republican National Committee Co-Chair Lara Trump calling Presler “my friend” and inviting him on stage during the former president’s return rally to where he was nearly assassinated in Butler, Penn.

Presler didn’t know he was supposed to speak but took to the podium in shorts and used the platform to court his target demographics: union workers, hunters, frat guys, sorority sisters and — most memorably — the Amish.

“We will protect your raw milk, your dairy, your farm, your school choice, your religious freedom, your ability to afford to have 10 beautiful children per family,” he said to the cheers of tens of thousands.

A self-described populist, Presler shamelessly pandered to groups he found were unlikely to be registered or vote for one reason or another.

Learning many Amish get married on Tuesdays (which would include Election Day) and elders discourage voting entirely, he sold many on early voting and voting privately by mail.

His relentless efforts to register Pennsylvania’s 930,000 hunters became an AI-generated meme.

And he energized volunteers by working with them in the field and updating them on the latest registration numbers every week, making their progress feel purposeful.

“We made voter registration sexy in Pennsylvania,” he said.

And though being a gay man in conservative politics has elicited hateful comments from time to time, Presler said he’s proud to have earned the respect of complete strangers from his work ethic.

“I always love when the super macho, alpha, manly man walks up, shakes my hand and says, ‘I love the work you do, and I couldn’t be more proud of you than if you were my own son,’” he said.

But cheesy as it sounds, he said he owes it all to his parents.

“I’m the man I am today because of my mom and dad.”