GOP plans to encourage early votes
Conservatives have to be persuaded that mailing ballots safe
PHOENIX — Inside a sprawling compound in Phoenix, leaders of the influential conservative group Turning Point Action were hatching plans to fix what they see as a mortal threat to the Republican Party: its voters’ avoidance of early voting, especially by mail, since the 2020 election.
The group’s officials, and many national Republicans, worry that Democrats have built a major strategic advantage by marshaling their voters to cast ballots early while Republican voters wait until Election Day.
That phenomenon stems largely from former President Donald Trump’s persistent falsehoods about mail voting — amplified at times by Turning Point Action officials — and the deep skepticism they have created among conservative voters.
Now an urgent search for a solution is underway, with Turning Point Action at the forefront.
The group, which began as an insurgent organization for young Republicans and has become a powerful player in right-wing politics, is aiming to raise and spend more than $108 million on a Chase the Vote program with hundreds of staff members in Arizona and Wisconsin.
They will follow a few simple steps: Identify Republican-leaning voters who have not turned out in the past two elections. Make a personal connection with them over the next seven months. Then, in the group’s words, “chase the ballots.”
“You’re each going to have assignments of hundreds of people,” Tyler Bowyer, the
group’s chief operating officer, explained to about 20 trainees last month. “Do you think wearing a MAGA hat attracts 50% of those people?”
Chase the Vote is one of the largest and most expensive efforts on the right to persuade Republicans to vote early. Their widespread abandonment of the practice, which was popular in both parties before 2020, means that Republican candidates are now far more at the mercy of Election Day problems, such as bad weather, long lines or voting machine hiccups.
At the same time, Turning Point Action’s program is still bound by strongly held conservative opinions on early voting and casting ballots by mail.
The group’s officials are quick to express skepticism of the security of those practices, despite a lack of
evidence of widespread fraud, and to call for tightening of election laws.
Bowyer has said publicly that his group is not trying to turn current Election Day voters into early voters. Its main focus, he says, is showing low-propensity voters — those who have not turned out in recent elections — all of the ways they can cast their ballot.
Charlie Kirk, the founder of the Turning Point empire, said in an interview: “It’s better to participate, even in that way” — early voting — “than not participate at all. That’s our argument.”
But improving Republicans’ early-voting turnout will be a challenge. Trump and his allies continue to argue that mail voting is rife with fraud.
During a Fox News townhall event last month, Trump told host Laura Ingraham: “If you have mail-in voting,
you automatically have fraud.” At a rally in Wisconsin last week, he promised to “secure” elections with “one-day voting.”
In the 2020 election, when many Americans voted by mail because of the pandemic, 7 million more Democrats than Republicans voted early in the 20 states that track party data, according to the United States Elections Project.
In the 2022 midterms, 2 million more Democrats than Republicans voted early in 24 states, according to the project, an advantage built almost exclusively off mail ballots. Each of those years, Republican candidates in crucial races lost narrowly.
Just 28% of Republicans support allowing any voter to cast a ballot by mail if they want to, compared with 84% of Democrats, according to a February study by the Pew
Research Center.
Mindful of this trend, the Republican National Committee began a Bank Your Vote program this year to encourage early voting. “We have to start encouraging Republican voters to do things like voting early, trust mail-in voting,” Lara Trump, the new co-chair of the committee and Trump’s daughter-in-law, said in an interview with NBC News last month.
Still, Trump has put the party in a difficult position. The new leadership at the RNC, handpicked by Trump and his allies, initially signaled that it would abandon Bank Your Vote, then reversed course.
Top officials at Turning Point continue to criticize voting by mail, even as they lead their new Chase the Vote effort.
Election Day in 2022 was when Kirk realized that things needed to change.
Walking into a polling place at a Phoenix church to proudly vote for Kari Lake and other Republicans, Kirk said, he was greeted bya2 ½-hour line caused mainly by malfunctioning machines. Other polling sites in the area had similar problems.
Lake ended up losing the race for governor to Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, by about 17,000 votes. Roughly 19,000 more Democrats than Republicans voted by mail.
“That kind of started a lot of soul-searching between our team,” Kirk said in an interview. “I asked the question, I said, ‘What could we have done better?’ ”
He added, referring to the weekslong period of early balloting, “We could have played better in Voting Month.”
That would seem to be a significant public shift from Kirk, who wrote an essay for Fox News in July 2020 calling mail voting a Democratic power grab and in social media posts around the 2020 election repeatedly questioned the security of mail voting.
In the interview, Kirk stood by those sentiments.
“There is understandable skepticism about filling in a precious ballot, which we take very seriously, and putting it into the mail,” he said, adding that conservatives were not fans of the Postal Service.
Still, Kirk says, Republicans should be aware that they have a “buffet line of voting options.”
In a memo sent to donors last year, Turning Point Action said it hoped to hire more than 500 full-time “ballot chasers” in Arizona and 350 in Wisconsin. If the group raises its entire goal of $108 million — officials said they had raised “tens of millions” but still had a ways to go — it plans to expand into Georgia and possibly Michigan.