GOP leaders urge fellow Republicans to be 'less skeptical' about early voting after suffering midterm losses

27 December 2022

In preparation for the 2024 presidential election, GOP leaders are encouraging voters to be less skeptical towards early and mail-in voting after many Republican losses in the midterms, The Hill reports.

It's a pivotal strategy for Republicans as the party previously deterred voters from embracing early voting – which has cost them several Senate seats. Arizona GOP strategist and former Donald Trump campaign staffer Brian Seitchik said “It is going to take time and some hard lessons until we get back to where we were.”

Seitchick believes the party’s messaging could be holding them back. “I don’t think there’s a secret sauce of messaging on this. I think we’re just going to have to do this the old-fashioned way, and that’s door-to-door.”

In a similar vein, current RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel recently penned a Fox News op-ed in which she wrote, “While the RNC invested millions of dollars in trying to persuade voters to vote early, our ecosystem must expand our voter turnout window, change the narrative on early voting, and examine the impact of absentee ballot and early vote chasing in states like Florida and North Carolina, as well as ballot harvesting in California, as a model for the rest of the country.”

Convincing their base to submit votes by mail will likely be an uphill battle, as a 2021 Pew Research study documented that 62 percent of Republicans believe “voters should only be allowed to vote early or absentee if they have a documented reason.”

Ford O’Connell, a Florida GOP media strategist and attorney, asserts that Republicans should consider an “urban election strategy” to attract metropolitan area voters. He told The Hill, “We have to start fighting and playing the game the way Democrats do. The Republicans are going to be hard-pressed to win the White House in 2024 if they don’t pick up Georgia and Arizona.”

He said that, “If you bank votes early, you don’t have to worry about tabulator malfunctions and people waiting in long lines on Election Day.”

To cover all demographics, McDaniel also considered the GOP’s rural voter base in her op-ed. “Our party must also address the lack of early vote days for rural Americans and work to ensure that we are adequately chasing ballots, whether early, by mail, or on election day,” she wrote.

Some GOP leaders are aware that their efforts to change Republican voters’ minds could take several election cycles. Former RNC spokesman Doug Heye says it will take RNC members in all 50 states, and that change “just can’t happen in three.”

“If Arizona continues down this road,” he said, “well, that affects potential Senate races, as it did this time, and House races and gubernatorial candidates.”

It’s clear that the change will take some time. O’Connell contends that, “There are a lot of ways that we can gripe about the rules but the fact of the matter is until the rules are changed, these are the rules we have.”

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