With encouragement from former President Donald Trump, Republicans are voting early again, flocking to the polls for in-person voting ahead of Election Day and helping to break records for ballots cast before November in key states like Georgia and North Carolina.
The Republican Party hopes this will solve a mechanical problem that some in the party blame for costing the 2020 presidential election and the key 2022 elections. Campaigns typically want their voters to cast ballots before Election Day so they can focus their resources on getting more fringe supporters to the polls at the last minute.
Republicans excelled at this before Trump turned against mail-in voting in 2020, spinning wild conspiracies about the age-old process and convincing his supporters to wait until Election Day to cast their votes. But the party is once again urging voters to cast their ballots early, and the former president is largely encouraging the change, with a conspiratorial tone.
“I want you to vote and I want you to go to the polls before Election Day because on Election Day they’re going to try to keep you home,” Trump told voters in North Carolina on Monday.
Republicans appear to be responding. In North Carolina, where Democrats had a lead of more than 30 percentage points of the vote at this point in 2022, they are ahead by just 1 percentage point this year. In Nevada, where Democrats for decades relied on robust early voting to counter the GOP on Election Day, about 1,000 more Republicans cast early ballots than Democrats this year.
However, it is unclear what this means for the elections. Early voting data only shows whether voters are registered with a party, not who they vote for. The early electorate can change from day to day as more and more people vote early. And what appear to be demographic trends in early elections may suddenly disappear once Election Day votes are included.
The voting process is still very early: the last of the seven swing states, Wisconsin, started voting early Tuesday morning. Parties can build up a lead in early voting only to see it disappear on election day because all their supporters have already cast their votes and the other party has not.
“As far as I know, Democrats are still trying to get more early votes. It’s just less of a disadvantage for Republicans,” said Michael McDonald, a political scientist at the University of Florida who is closely watching early voting. But McDonald warned: “We don’t know if this is already a furniture shift or an additional strength for the Republicans.”
One thing is clear: the return to early voting between the two parties has helped break records. North Carolina and Georgia both reported record turnout on the first day of in-person early voting, and this extended to states that are not competitive at the presidential level, such as South Carolina, which reported its own record when early voting opened Monday. .
Republicans still seem to have an aversion to voting by mail. They have increased their share of mail-in votes in several states but still lag Democrats, especially in Pennsylvania, where there is no in-person early option and Republicans have mailed more than 300,000 fewer ballots than Democrats. But the Republican Party is making up ground with early in-person voting in most competitive states.
Still, the years of sowing conspiracies about early voting and voting by mail have taken their toll on the conservative electorate. At Elon Musk’s first solo event in support of Trump last week, he encouraged the crowd to vote early, a plea to which some in the crowd responded by shouting back, “Why?”
