More Republicans appear to be voting early, despite Trump’s mixed messages

PHOENIX — Republicans have spent months and millions of dollars on an effort to push former President Donald Trump’s most loyal supporters to change their minds about voting early.

There is some evidence to suggest it’s working.

With polls opening Tuesday in Wisconsin, some form of early voting has commenced in all seven of the swing states. As of Monday, 17 million people nationwide had already cast a vote — and there are initial indications that Republicans are showing up to the polls or returning absentee ballots with more gusto than in recent years. In many cases, Republican officials and canvassers on the ground are spurring their voters on with the same debunked conspiracy theories about fraud that Trump has used to sow doubt about the integrity of the count.

“They have done a better job of turning out their voters to vote early,” said Sam Almy, a Democratic political strategist who tracks early ballots in Arizona. “I think they realized that early voting is easy and convenient: It turns out your voters quickly, and they don’t have to gamble on turning out all their voters on Election Day.”

It’s a remarkable turnabout from four years ago, when Trump had thoroughly demonized every method of voting that didn’t occur in person on Election Day. As states expanded access to mail and absentee voting at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump repeatedly discouraged his voters from taking advantage. He said mail ballots created “chaos and confusion” and asserted without evidence that it would lead to “election interference by foreign countries.” Many of his supporters believed him, and Joe Biden won, buoyed by Democratic dominance in early and mail votes.

This year, Trump has offered a more muddled message on the various methods of voting, while others in his party worked overtime to reverse course. The Republican National Committee, with his daughter-in-law Lara Trump now the co-chair, poured resources into programs that would encourage Republican voters to submit ballots early. The former president himself voted early in the Florida Republican primary over the summer.

Even so, Trump has kept up the attacks. Campaigning in Pennsylvania last month, he called early voting “stupid stuff” — moments after telling rallygoers that they should “start right away.” Earlier this year, he called mail voting “totally corrupt” at a Michigan rally. He told a British interviewer in March that mail-in ballots inevitably lead to “cheating.”

Not all states release early vote data broken down by partisanship, limiting the snapshot. But available data and experts who closely following ballot returns see an uptick for Republicans in a few key places.

In Nevada, about 39.5% of the roughly 245,000 ballots submitted as of Monday evening came from Republicans, and 36.3% came from Democrats, according to the secretary of state’s latest tallies.

Arizona ballot data compiled by Uplift, a Democratic group that Almy works for, and reviewed by The New York Times suggested that Republican ballots surged in the initial days of early voting and has tapered off to a 2020 pace more recently. Democrats, though, are well behind their 2020 early voting pace, suggesting a realignment reminiscent of the pre-Trump era in Arizona, when the state was a Republican stronghold and GOP mail voters outpaced Democrats in early returns. (Biden was the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the state since President Bill Clinton in 1996.)

“It’s kind of returning to where they were, of having this ballot advantage,” Almy said.

In both Nevada and Arizona, Republican officials have leaned on a message that “banking” votes early is the surest way of avoiding supposed chicanery in the ballot-counting process. Both states were prominent in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

At a rally Saturday kicking off the first day of early voting in Nevada, Michael McDonald, the chair of the state Republican Party, implored the crowd to encourage their friends and family to get to the polls as soon as possible.

“Go vote,” he said. “You got all this time to vote early. You can mail in ballots. You want to do it that way? That’s fine. Or you do it Election Day. Make a plan, execute that plan.”

“You got to vote early, or the Democrats will steal it,” one attendee hollered.

That this message was coming from McDonald was particularly notable. In 2020, Republicans tried and failed to get the courts to stop election officials from counting mail ballots in Clark County before Election Day. He was indicted by the state attorney general last year as one of six Republicans who signed false certificates trying to award Nevada’s electoral votes in 2020 to Trump, even though Biden won the state

Republicans have also changed their tune on so-called ballot harvesting, or the practice of a voter allowing someone else to return their ballot, which was first permitted in Nevada in 2020 and is legal in many states. The party has spent years arguing that the process is a recipe for fraud.

“Now you can ballot-harvest. That’s kind of against our principle, but the Democrats changed the rules, so the best thing to do is play by the rules,” McDonald told the crowd at a recent campaign rally in Reno, Nevada, for Trump. “Make sure you harvest ballots. You get your neighbors’ ballots if they can’t go. You help them to the polls. You vote early.”

Jon Ralston, the prominent Nevada political journalist and commentator, said it was highly unusual to see Republicans hold a lead at this point in early voting. Typically, he said, it is Democrats who bank an early advantage and must fight to stave off Election Day votes that skew Republican.

“These numbers are very good for Republicans,” Ralston said.

Still, Ralston said it was difficult to know whether that is a sign of unusually strong Republican momentum, or these are simply voters who would have normally voted on Election Day getting the process out of the way early.

Democrats have maintained confidence in their canvassing and turnout operations.

Local unions power this effort, knocking on doors and checking in with voters about whether they had submitted ballots. The Nevada chapter of the AFL-CIO has committed to knocking on the doors of 70,000 union members in southern Nevada three times each on behalf of the Harris campaign and downballot Democrats. Canvassers from the Culinary Workers Local 226 began campaigning for Democrats in early August and expect to knock on 900,000 doors and talk to 130,000 voters by Election Day.

At a news conference last week, Daniele Monroe-Moreno, the chair of Nevada’s Democratic Party, took aim at McDonald, whose trial as part of the fake elector scheme is expected to begin in January.

“It is my No. 1 priority that every Nevada voter have equitable access to the ballot box,” Monroe-Moreno said. “On the other side, Nevada Republicans are setting up an environment to amplify more falsehoods to deny election results.”

Republicans maintain that they dislike early voting — and Trump continues to promise to restrict it — but that they are simply playing within the system that has been set up. Trump’s past criticism of early voting, many believe, undermined Republicans’ pursuit of White House. Karoline Leavitt, a Trump spokesperson, said in a statement that the campaign wanted citizens to vote in whatever manner “works best for them.”

“Our aggressive political operation is leaving no stone unturned in reaching all supporters who prefer to vote early,” Leavitt added.

Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist who leads the group Turning Point Action, made encouraging early voting a priority for his organization ever since he witnessed long lines and delays at the polls in Arizona during the 2022 midterms. There, Kirk’s group has assumed a large chunk of the Republican turnout operation with a “chase the vote” program that is aimed at persuading low-propensity conservatives to vote and then helping them plan to return their ballots early.

On a recent day in the sweltering Phoenix suburbs, Turning Point staff fanned out to ring doorbells and ensure Republicans were voting early.

“I do appreciate the face-to-face,” said Anne Sterling, a Republican in Mesa, Arizona, who said the conversation with a Turning Point staff member was a good reminder to submit her ballot “because we’re busy, and we don’t take the time.”

In a sign of just how critical the reversal is for Republicans, Kari Lake, the GOP nominee for U.S. Senate in Arizona and a leading proponent of Trump’s stolen election lies, is now encouraging her supporters to vote early.

She voted in person herself earlier this month, and her campaign said that supporters voting early would allow it to focus resources on the dwindling number of people who had yet to cast a ballot. In the past, she has criticized early voting. A lawsuit she filed after losing her race for governor in 2022 was based in part on questioning the signature verification procedures for the same mail ballots she is now encouraging.

Gina Swoboda, the chair of Arizona’s Republican Party, is another official who has cast doubt on the integrity of mail-in and early voting and called for the practice to be curtailed. Now she, too, is urging voters to get their ballots in early.

“Don’t get jammed up, don’t have to wait on the line on Election Day — vote early,” Swoboda said in a video message that the state party posted on social media last week.

That is not to say that Republicans aren’t still divided on this issue. The Republican Party in Washoe County, Nevada’s second-largest, has advised voters in social media posts to “opt out of mail-in voting.”

Before early voting started in the state Saturday, Stavros Anthony, Nevada’s lieutenant governor and a Republican, said in an interview that he disliked the availability of mail-in voting and ballot harvesting. “Democrats will do whatever they can to disrupt our election process,” Anthony said.

Still, Anthony said he and his wife planned to vote in person on the first day polls were open.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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