Former President Trump’s muddled messages on early voting risk hurting Republicans as they look to revamp their strategy heading into 2024.
During a town hall interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity this week, Trump said he would encourage Republicans to do early voting. At the same time, he also sowed doubt over the approach — baselessly alleging people make “phony ballots” and claiming “a lot of bad things happen to those ballots.”
Those comments are a stark contrast to recent initiatives launched by the Republican National Committee (RNC) and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) to encourage GOP voters to cast their ballots early as they look to make up ground against Democrats in early voting.
“It’s not helpful. I think [Trump] raising questions about mail-in votes is a big part of why we don’t control the Senate and why we have such a slim majority in the House. It’s just ludicrous that the party wouldn’t be united in encouraging voters to vote early,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist who worked on Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-Fla.) 2016 presidential campaign.
Republicans are increasingly embracing early voting as a way to juice up GOP voter turnout as the party looks to change Republicans’ mindset over a strategy the former president has demonized.
Last month, the RNC launched a “Bank Your Vote” campaign that aims to encourage voters to vote early. A press release stated the initiative would “encourage, educate, and activate Republican voters on when, where, and how to lock in their votes as early as possible, through in-person early voting, absentee voting, and ballot harvesting where legal.”
Earlier this month, Youngkin and several Republican groups teamed up to launch the Secure Your Vote Virginia initiative aimed at encouraging Republicans and swing voters in the state to cast ballots early in person or vote by mail. The initiative comes ahead of Virginia’s state Legislature elections this November.
A Virginia GOP strategist confirmed the Secure Your Vote Virginia initiative is a seven-figure effort and said they’ve been “very pleased with how the response has been” so far.
“What Sean Hannity and [Florida Gov.] Ron DeSantis and Glenn Younkin and [Georgia Gov.] Brian Kemp are saying is the rules are the rules,” the strategist said, adding later, “Get off the sideline, don’t fight with one hand behind your back and follow the rules that are allowed and make sure you’re getting as many votes as you can.”
Republican secretaries of state — the top elections officials in their states — have also encouraged early voting, including in their campaigns. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s (R) office noted last December that the state broke records for midterm early voting turnout and midterm absentee mail ballots cast during the November election.
“Georgia voters have been utilizing early voting for several election cycles now, and successful campaigns like mine and Gov. Brian Kemp have always incorporated early voting into our campaign strategies— as would any candidate who actually wants to win,” Raffensperger said in a statement to The Hill.
In Kentucky, Secretary of State Michael Adams (R) has encouraged early voting, and his office told The Hill that Republicans are having an edge over Democrats in using it.
“From 2020 through the May primary of this year, we’ve seen slightly more Republicans than Democrats take advantage of early voting — proportionate to our voter registration breakdown,” Michon Lindstrom, a spokesperson for Adams, told The Hill in an email.
Adams in May released unofficial early voting turnout numbers ahead of the gubernatorial primary, showing almost 42,000 Republicans and around 30,700 Democrats used no-excuse early voting.
Even Trump more recently this year was encouraging the use of early voting methods.
Speaking to a crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in March, he said, “Republicans must compete using every lawful means to win. That means swamping the left with mail-in votes, early votes and Election Day votes. Have to do it. We have to change our thinking.”
But while Trump suggested to Hannity this week he would encourage early voting heading into 2024, he also suggested Republicans couldn’t entirely trust the process.
“I will, but those ballots get lost also, Sean,” Trump said when asked if he’d encourage his supporters to vote early. “You know, they send them in, and all of a sudden, they’re gone.”
Trump’s campaign for its part has said the former president has been straightforward on his view of early voting.
“He’s been very consistent in his messaging all campaign long. Even though it’s an imperfect system, we need to do whatever is allowed legally to ensure every vote is counted,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in an email to The Hill, pointing to his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March.
There, Trump said Republicans must be “swamping the left with mail-in votes, early votes and Election Day votes.”
Some Republicans have brushed off the muddled messaging, saying Trump’s comments to Hannity were one isolated interview.
“I don’t think it’s gonna be — that one interview and those comments — are going to be impactful,” said Republican strategist David Carney.
For candidates, “If that’s one of their major talking points, it could,” Carney said. “But we can’t win on one-day voting.”
But other members of the party see it differently, and they’ll need to fine-tune their strategy on voting to win competitive elections.
“When you have somebody like former President Trump talking about something in generalities, it can certainly serve to muddle the message,” said Allegheny County GOP chairman Sam DeMarco.
DeMarco, who’s part of the Pennsylvania GOP’s task force on mail-in voting, said Republicans in the state are getting involved in their own early voting efforts.
He said they “spoke to a number of different states who use mail-in ballots in early voting to try to glean and learn best practices from them. And we’re working to put a number of those in place here in Pennsylvania, and in particularly in Allegheny County.”
Political experts say Trump should have an incentive for changing his tune on early voting — especially if he wants to win the Republican presidential nomination again.
“I think it underscores what we’ve known all along, which is that, you know, Donald Trump … is not very disciplined” as a campaigner, explained Charles Stewart III, a political science professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and director of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab.
“If he wants to win and if he’s convinced that they’re going — that Republicans are going to do better if they can … bank these votes, I think his messaging will come around, and it will be more focused,” he added.
Brett Samuels contributed.