Trump’s vilification of mail and early voting methods, a key component of his web of stolen-election conspiracy theories, stoked a deep partisan divide that Republicans have spent the better part of the last four years trying to undo. They have also tried on and off since 2020 to persuade Trump himself to embrace early voting.
But with just weeks to go, they have plainly failed to win him over. While Trump has sometimes come around — urging his supporters at rallies, in tele-rallies and through social media posts to take advantage of expanded voting options — Republicans warn his rhetoric is threatening to undermine it all.
“It’s counterproductive,” said David Urban, a former Trump campaign senior adviser who led his successful Pennsylvania effort in 2016. While the former president has occasionally warmed to the issue, Urban said, when “we’re kind of pushing a message, and then the president comes and says, ‘I’m not so big on that,’ it’s much more difficult to convince people.”
Trump’s resurrection of his baseless claims of early and mail voting fraud — one way in which he is laying the groundwork to potentially challenge the results of a second election if he loses — comes as Republicans and GOP-aligned groups wage multimillion-dollar campaigns to get voters in key states to embrace those methods. It’s a massive effort aimed at getting reliable Republican voters to cast ballots early so that the party can redirect resources in the final stretch of the campaign toward winning over lower-propensity voters who could decide a close election.
“The whole idea behind absentee voting is you’re banking that vote, you’ve got that person, you know they’re going to vote for you, you get them off the list,” said Mark Graul, a GOP strategist based in Wisconsin. “This is how you get the extra 5,000, 10,000 votes that may decide the election.”
And Trump’s scaremongering “screws it up,“ Graul said. “It’s silly.”
Republicans’ early voting efforts have been driven by frustration at the string of electoral losses the party has suffered since 2016 and a recognition that voters are broadly comfortable with mailing or otherwise casting their ballots early.
“For three years, I didn’t like it. But during those three years, we lost elections,” said Tom Eddy, the chair of the GOP in Erie County, Pennsylvania, a bellwether that voted for Barack Obama, Trump and then Joe Biden.
“You have to accept it in order to have a chance to win. And that’s what we’re doing. We’ve been pushing these things like crazy,” Eddy said in an interview.
Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee launched a “Swamp the Vote” program to encourage voters to use early voting methods and have invested millions of dollars into get-out-the-vote initiatives that include an emphasis on early voting, according to the RNC. GOP officials have been criss-crossing the country urging Republicans to vote early, pitching it as both convenient and safe. Trump’s campaign displays messages at his rallies encouraging people to cast their ballots before November — talking points that are also loaded into his teleprompter. And the former president has been delivering the message through tele-rallies in key states.
Pro-Trump super PACs and other Republican-aligned groups have bolstered those efforts. In Pennsylvania, for instance, the Republican State Leadership Committee and Sentinel Action Fund have joined forces with Keystone Renewal PAC, the super PAC supporting Senate candidate Dave McCormick, on a massive $12 million effort to boost the number of GOP voters using mail balloting in the key state. As of August, the group was nearly a third of the way to its goal of adding 200,000 to the annual vote-by-mail application list.
But state data shows little improvement in mail voting rates among Republican voters. After a pandemic-fueled peak in 2020, mail voting has roughly settled in the biggest battleground state. And this year, as in the past three, registered Republicans are severely lagging Democrats — accounting for just over a quarter of mail ballots requested and less than a fifth of those that have been returned as of Friday, according to state data.
Republicans point to Virginia as a state where their early voting push has helped get voters to cast their ballots ahead of Election Day. But even there, it’s proven a challenge to cut into Democrats’ advantage. The voter data firm L2, which is tracking early voting, found that voters who are Democrats — based on modeled partisanship, as Virginia does not have party registration — still made up a majority of ballots cast so far through early and mail voting. The party’s advantage only grew when including ballots requested but not yet returned.
And Trump has undermined Republicans’ — and even his own — messaging nearly every step of the way.
In January, after winning the Iowa caucuses, Trump claimed mail ballots beget “crooked elections.” He called them “treacherous” during an event in Detroit in June. During an interview on Real America’s Voice in September, he claimed, without evidence, that the postal service would lose mail ballots either “purposefully” or through “incompetence,” and floated filing a lawsuit against the agency. And at a rally in western Pennsylvania late last month, Trump encouraged people to vote early, only to reverse course and call it “stupid stuff” moments later.
“It does send a mixed message,” said Andy Reilly, the Republican national committeeman from Pennsylvania. “But I’m confident in everything I’ve heard from the Trump team, and his campaign has said on numerous occasions that independents and Republicans and Democrats should feel safe in using the mail-in ballot.”
Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement that the former president “has encouraged ALL Americans to vote absentee, early, or in-person on Election Day” and that “our aggressive political operation is leaving no stone unturned in reaching all supporters who prefer to vote early and ensuring that they submit their ballot by state deadlines.”
Some Republicans working with the party downplayed the impact of Trump’s inconsistent messaging, dismissing his talk of nefarious ballot schemes as nothing more than tacit acknowledgments that while the former president has accepted early voting as valid, it is still not his preference. And they have taken pains to reassure Republicans that mail voting is secure.
“Donald Trump has not been a big fan of early voting in the past, and I’m not sure he’s much of a fan of it now,” said Brian Schimming, the chair of the Wisconsin GOP.
But “for whatever asides he might make here and there, the message is pretty clear,” Schimming added. “At no point ever, when I have talked to the president, as he said: ‘Brian, I really want you to stop talking about early vote.’”