Republicans are spending tens of millions of dollars to get Republican voters to vote before Election Day.
They are frustrated because Donald Trump keeps getting in their way.
In recent weeks, the former president has dismissed early voting as “stupid” and falsely claimed that 20 percent of mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania are “fraudulent” and suggested that postal workers could be losing “hundreds of thousands of ballots, perhaps on purpose.” and baselessly accused Democrats of exploiting a program that sends ballots to overseas and military voters to evade citizenship checks.
Trump’s defamation of the mail and early voting methods, a key part of his web of conspiracy theories about a stolen election, has fueled a deep partisan divide that Republicans have spent much of the past four years trying to undo. They have also tried on and off since 2020 to convince Trump himself to embrace early voting.
But with only a few weeks to go, they clearly haven’t managed to win him over. While Trump sometimes comes around — urging his supporters at rallies, teleconferences and through social media posts to take advantage of expanded voting options — Republicans warn his rhetoric threatens to undermine everything.
“It’s counterproductive,” said David Urban, a former senior adviser to the Trump campaign who led his successful campaign in Pennsylvania in 2016. While the former president has occasionally warmed to the issue, Urban said, “when If we convey some kind of message, and then the president comes and says: ‘I’m not really concerned with that’, then it is much more difficult to convince people.”
Trump’s resurrection of his baseless claims of fraud in early and mail-in voting — a way he’s laying the groundwork to potentially challenge the results of a runoff election if he loses — comes as Republicans and Party-affiliated groups are waging multimillion-dollar campaigns to get voters in key states to embrace these methods. It’s a massive effort aimed at getting reliable Republican voters to vote early so the party can refocus resources in the latter part of the campaign toward winning over lower-propensity voters who could decide a close election .
“The whole idea behind absentee voting is you save that vote, you have that person, you know they’re going to vote for you, you take them off the list,” said Mark Graul, a GOP strategist based in Wisconsin. “This is how you get the extra 5,000 to 10,000 votes that could decide the election.”
And Trump’s fear-mongering is “ruining it,” Graul said. “It’s silly.”
Republicans’ early voting efforts have been driven by frustration over the party’s string of election losses since 2016 and by a recognition that voters generally feel comfortable mailing or otherwise casting their ballots early voice.
“I didn’t like it for three years. But during those three years we lost elections,” said Tom Eddy, the chairman of the Republican Party in Erie County, Pennsylvania, a bellwether who voted for Barack Obama, Trump and then Joe Biden.
“You have to accept it to have a chance of winning. And that’s what we do. We pushed these things like crazy,” Eddy said in an interview.
Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee launched a “Swamp the Vote” program to encourage voters to use early voting methods and have invested millions of dollars in get-out-the-vote initiatives with an emphasis on early voting, according to the RNC. . GOP officials have swept the country urging Republicans to vote early, calling it both easy and safe. Trump’s campaign is showing messages at its rallies encouraging people to cast their votes before November — talking points that are also loaded into his teleprompter. And the former president has delivered the message through conference calls in key states.
Pro-Trump super PACs and other Republican groups have amplified these efforts. In Pennsylvania, for example, the Republican State Leadership Committee and the Sentinel Action Fund have joined forces with Keystone Renewal PAC, the super PAC supporting Senate candidate Dave McCormick, for a massive $12 million effort to increase the number of Republican voters using mail-in ballots . key is. As of August, the group was nearly a third of the way toward its goal of adding 200,000 people to its annual vote-by-mail list.
But state data shows little improvement in voting by mail among Republican voters. After a pandemic-induced spike in 2020, mail-in voting has roughly established itself in the biggest battleground state. And this year, as for the past three years, registered Republicans are seriously trailing Democrats — accounting for just over a quarter of ballots requested and less than a fifth of ballots returned Friday, according to state data.
Republicans point to Virginia as a state where their early voting efforts helped voters cast ballots before Election Day. But even there, getting into Democrats’ favor has proven to be a challenge. The voter data company L2, which tracks early voting, found that voters who are Democrats — based on modeled partisanship, since Virginia has no party registration — still made up a majority of votes cast so far through early and mail-in voting. The party’s advantage only increased if the requested but not yet returned ballots were included.
And Trump has undermined Republicans’ message — and even his own — at almost every step.
In January, after winning the Iowa caucuses, Trump claimed that mail-in ballots cause a “rigged election.” He called them “treacherous” at an event in Detroit in June. During an interview with Real America’s Voice in September, he claimed, without evidence, that the Postal Service was losing mail-in ballots “on purpose” or through “incompetence” and threatened to file a lawsuit against the Postal Service. And at a rally late last month in western Pennsylvania, Trump encouraged people to vote early, only to reverse course and call it “stupid stuff” moments later.
“It sends a mixed message,” said Andy Reilly, the Republican national committeeman from Pennsylvania. “But I trust everything I’ve heard from the Trump team, and his campaign has said on numerous occasions that independents, Republicans and Democrats should feel safe using the mail-in ballot.”
Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement that the former president “encouraged ALL Americans to vote absentee, early or in-person on Election Day” and that “our aggressive political operation is leaving no stone unturned in reaching out to all supporters who prefer indicate they want to vote early and make sure they submit their ballots by the deadlines.”
Some Republicans working with the party downplayed the impact of Trump’s inconsistent message, dismissing his talk of nefarious voting schemes as nothing more than tacit admission that while the former president has accepted early voting as valid, it is still not is preferred. And they have taken pains to reassure Republicans that voting by mail is safe.
“Donald Trump wasn’t a big fan of early voting in the past, and I’m not sure he’s a big fan of it now,” said Brian Schimming, chairman of the Wisconsin Republican Party.
But “apart from the comments he makes here and there, the message is pretty clear,” Schimming added. “At no point did I speak to the president as he said, ‘Brian, I really want you to stop talking about early elections.’”
Adam Wren, Jessica Piper and Liz Crampton contributed to this report.
