By Tim Reid, Julia Harte and Nathan Layne
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson was traveling to a campaign rally aboard Donald Trump’s private jet in early April when he decided to broach the delicate issue of early voting.
As the Boeing 757 flew from Florida to Green Bay, Wisconsin, Johnson urged the Republican candidate to use his speech to urge his supporters to cast their votes before Election Day.
Early voting often draws a barrage of vitriol from Trump, who falsely claims the country is vulnerable to fraud and cost him the 2020 election.
But Johnson is one of several senior Republicans — many of them in key swing states such as Wisconsin — who worry that Trump’s demonization of early voting could torpedo his hopes of regaining the White House on Nov. 5.
“I encouraged the president to encourage Wisconsin Republicans to save their votes,” Johnson said, adding that he encountered no resistance from Trump. “I would advise him to come on board.”
“We must do everything we can to take full advantage of the rules as they are written. The Democrats certainly did that,” said the 69-year-old senator, who himself recently converted to early voting.
But not only did Trump fail to emphasize the importance of early voting at the April 2 rally, he told the crowd of more than 3,000 supporters that his ultimate goal was to limit voting to just Election Day, a message that was greeted with great cheers.
And when Johnson — during his third term in the Senate — took the convention center stage to urge Republicans to vote early, he received lukewarm applause from only a few people.
Proponents of early voting say it increases turnout and avoids the problems of people not being able to vote on Election Day because of bad weather, logistical problems at polling places or personal reasons. Voter rights groups say there is no data showing that early voting can lead to fraudulent ballots.
In the last presidential election in 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, early voting rose to new highs. And in the 2022 midterm elections, half of American voters cast ballots before Election Day, according to the US Census Bureau.
The November election will be a hard-fought battle between Trump and President Joe Biden, polls show. The Democratic incumbent defeated Trump in Wisconsin by just 20,000 votes in 2020 and the state is once again a big prize for both parties.
Not pursuing an early voting strategy in 2024 would be “political suicide,” said Brian Schimming, the chairman of the Republican Party of Wisconsin.
Reuters spoke to Republican Party leaders in four of the likely seven battleground states: Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia and North Carolina. They told Reuters they are doing everything they can to encourage Republicans not to wait until Election Day to cast their votes.
The newly installed leaders of the Republican National Committee (RNC) – Michael Whatley and Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump – emphasize that the former president agrees to early voting.
“We urge all Republicans to vote early, by mail, on Election Day, or whatever method works best for them,” Claire Zunk, a spokesperson for the RNC, said in a statement to Reuters.
But, as Johnson’s experience underlines, it is not clear whether voters will be willing to embrace the new message after Trump’s repeated and persistent claims of fraud.
Suzanne Sliva, a 60-year-old entrepreneur from Lucas, Texas, said she views early voting with suspicion and believes it should be reserved for exceptional circumstances.
“Voting is a day,” she said as she waited for Trump to speak at a National Rifle Association (NRA) event in Dallas, Texas, last weekend. “Everything will be counted in one day and we will know who the winner is before midnight.”
Michael McDonald, a political science professor at the University of Florida who has analyzed election data for more than three decades, said it would take a lot of messaging to change the minds of some voters, “especially Trump himself.”
MIXED MESSAGES
However, Trump’s position remains unclear. At a campaign rally in New Jersey on May 11, the candidate, for the first time in a speech this year, promoted early voting for the November 5 general election: “Get an absentee or mail-in ballot, vote early or vote on Election Day,” he told the supporters.
Yet in the same speech he said that “voting by mail is largely corrupt.”
And at a rally on April 13, Trump compared early voting to “stealing” the vote. In March, he called voting by mail a hoax.
He has called mail-in voting corrupt or a fraud at least 11 times in speeches this year alone, according to a Reuters analysis of his prepared remarks.
But beyond the teleprompter, Trump has posted twice on Truth Social since mid-April that early voting is important.
“That really doesn’t help,” said Oscar Brock, an RNC committee member from Tennessee and an early voting advocate, referring to Trump’s mixed messages.
Voting rights groups accuse the RNC of double dealing in publicly supporting early voting. They note that the RNC, Republican lawmakers in battleground states and conservative groups continue to pass laws and file lawsuits limiting access to early voting.
The activists say these efforts disproportionately affect minority groups, who tend to vote for the Democratic Party in large numbers. Republicans deny the accusation and say they want to protect the integrity of the voting process.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said the former president has always advocated for free and fair elections, “where every legal vote is counted and every case of fraud is rooted out.”
“Democrats have proven they are willing to change voting rules in the middle of a pandemic that has made our elections more susceptible to fraud,” Cheung said.
In the 2020 presidential election, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Democratic election officials in many states expanded early voting by adding ballot drop locations, extending voting deadlines and increasing the use of vote-by-mail.
The Democratic National Committee is investing “tens of millions” of dollars this year to promote early voting and voting by mail, said Alex Floyd, the DNC’s rapid response director.
In 2020, 82% of Biden supporters voted early, compared to 62% of Trump’s, according to the Pew Research Center, an independent Washington think tank. Nearly twice as many Biden voters mailed their ballots than Trump supporters, according to Pew.
SWING STATES
Despite Trump’s mixed messages, Republican party chairs in the four swing states told Reuters they were pushing ahead with early voting.
Josh McKoon, chairman of the Republican Party in Georgia, said the party sent a video to 70,000 registered Republicans via social media and email on April 29 to promote early voting.
In North Carolina, Republican Chairman Jason Simmons said the party is holding training sessions with county and district chairmen on how to educate voters about the importance of early voting, while in Michigan, Republican Party Chairman Pete Hoekstra is pushing for early voting every time he speaks. grassroots activists across the state.
In Wisconsin, Schimming, the party chairman, said top Republican officials in the state had released videos of them voting at the start of this year’s primaries to reinforce their message of casting ballots before Election Day.
And in Pennsylvania, the Republican State Leadership Committee, along with two other Republican groups, have launched a $10 million initiative to promote mail-in voting in the state, an initiative first reported by Reuters.
Turning Point Action, a conservative group once skeptical of early voting, says it plans to spend more than $100 million in Wisconsin, Arizona and Michigan to persuade Republicans, who rarely vote, to vote.
Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for TPA, said they hoped a majority of those votes would be cast before Election Day.
DISPUTE
Celina Stewart, chief counsel for the League of Women Voters, a nonpartisan voting rights group, said early voting makes the election process more secure because it catches errors. About 47 states use some form of early voting, she added.
But in five swing states this year — Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and North Carolina — Republican lawmakers have either passed bills or introduced legislation aimed at restricting access to early voting 28 times, according to a Reuters analysis of legislation in state houses.
The bills sought multiple ways to restrict access to early voting. They include three provisions to eliminate early in-person voting altogether, 15 to make it easier to prevent people from voting early, and seven to reduce early voting locations, according to Reuters figures.
The RNC has also filed or supported 29 lawsuits aimed at restricting early voting, 17 of which involve mail-in voting, according to Democracy Docket, a progressive voting rights group that tracks election-related lawsuits.
“Republicans are trying to sway their voters and at the same time there is an effort to suppress the vote and limit access to voting,” said Wendy Weiser, vice president for democracy at New York University’s nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice.
Research shows that restricting access to early voting “disproportionately reduces the access and participation of voters of color,” Weiser said, because they often work multiple jobs or lack access to transportation, making their access to polling places on Election Day more difficult .
Zunk, the RNC spokesman, did not respond directly to Reuters questions about the lawsuits or legislative efforts but said the party was “dedicated to securing the vote across the country so that all voters can have complete confidence in fair elections.”
(Reporting by Tim Reid, Julia Harte and Nathan Layne. Additional reporting by Brad Heath and Gram Slattery. Editing by Ross Colvin and Daniel Flynn)
