The GOP Changes Its Mind on Early Voting

Georgia voters stunned observers last week by turning out in record numbers for early voting. And it wasn’t just Democrats. Republican voters appear to be embracing voting by mail and early in-person voting — the very tactics they rejected in 2020 as a part of the liberal conspiracy to steal elections. 

In Florida, according to tracker VoteHub, Republicans are voting early at rates that outstrip Democrats; in Wisconsin, the two parties are nearly tied. In Pennsylvania, another critical swing state, Democrats have a whopping lead of roughly 63% to 27%. 

Pennsylvania aside, this change didn’t come out of nowhere. Republican donors have begun to change the base’s mind about a tactic they recently maligned as fraudulent. Beginning in 2023 and accelerating into the election year, GOP movers and shakers have put millions into turning out key constituencies. “It’s simple math: You want to get as many votes before Election Day,” then-RNC chair Ronna McDaniel told NBC News in June 2023. “But that certainly is a challenge if you have people in your ecosystem saying don’t vote early or don’t vote by mail.” 

The drive to convert conservatives to early and mail-in voting has been uphill and forced to contend with a major roadblock: Donald Trump. The GOP standard bearer has yet to get over the fact that he lost the 2020 election and still blames “irregularities” for the defeat, including changes in voting laws to make it easier to vote in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. While Trump has urged his supporters for over a year to use early and mail-in voting, he can’t shake the tic of attacking these same practices. “We have to get rid of mail-in ballots because once you have mail-in ballots, you have crooked elections,” he said in January. Two months later, he told far right British pundit Nigel Farage, “The ballots are a disaster. Any time the mail is involved, you’re going to have cheating.”

This self-contradictory messaging has left Republicans scrambling to reverse a clear Democratic advantage. A Pew survey in July found that just 37% of Republicans believe that voters should have full and unfettered access to early voting, compared with 82% of Democrats. 

The GOP’s get-out-the-vote effort also faces headwinds in the ground campaign the Trump campaign has assembled to door-knock and activate voters. A devastating Reuters report found that field contractors hired by Elon Musk-funded America PAC have been cheating, using apps to disguise their real movements, while staffers said the pay wasn’t worth the effort of knocking on doors. “Our auditors keep catching people cheating,” read one text message from Nevada America PAC contractor Lone Mountain Strategies. “We’ve fired two people today and auditors are going around checking doors for flyers.”

Here, too, Trump does not appear to realize he is shooting himself in the foot. Republican sources told Rolling Stone that, “Donald Trump loves what Elon and his operation are doing in the battleground states, and nobody trying to convince him otherwise lately has had any effect.”

Perhaps the former president is looking at the turnout in Georgia as evidence that things are going his way. Polling has consistently shown Trump in the lead in the state, and big early voting numbers are unlikely to dissuade him from his strategy. But a new poll shows that Vice President Kamala Harris has a nationwide early voting advantage of nearly 2-to-1 — allowing her campaign to focus on locking in “some previously reliable Democratic voters who have drifted away over the past few weeks, like young Black and Latino men,” David Paleologos, director of Suffolk’s Political Research Center, told USA Today.

In an election this close, almost anything could shift the balance of power and send either candidate to the White House. The margin in Michigan is so narrow as to be statistically insignificant. Democrats won in 2020 due in part to their embrace of the expansion of voting techniques. If Republicans are following their lead despite the mixed messaging from the top of the ticket, that advantage could be gone.