Republicans Need to Embrace Early Voting

But the GOP’s real problem wasn’t its message or the messengers. It was a more basic failure: not understanding or accepting how Americans today participate in elections. Early voting and mail-in balloting have irrevocably changed things. Election Day no longer counts as it once did. Yet Republicans continue to rely on a massive Election Day turnout to prevail, while conceding the rest of the electoral terrain to Democrats. When Democrats win, some Republicans blame election fraud or unfair practices instead of their own failure to adjust their ground game.

In fact, the more that Republicans decry mail-in ballots and early voting, and wish that somehow they could elect governors and state legislators who will bring back the good old days and the old rules, the more they miss an opportunity to seize the new electoral terrain from their opponents. If Republicans don’t recognize the new rules that shape elections, 2024 will be as disappointing as 2022, if not more so.

Forty-six states allow early in-person voting; 27 don’t require voters to justify using an absentee or mail-in ballot. Eight states, including Nevada and Oregon, conduct elections primarily by mail. Twenty-five states, including Florida, New York, and California, allow “ballot harvesting,” in which someone other than the voter hands in absentee or mail-in ballots. According to the Los Angeles Times, this year nearly 46 million voters cast their ballots before Election Day. That’s more than one-third (37%) of the total 122 million votes cast in the 2018 midterms, which was the highest midterm turnout rate since 1914.

TargetSmart, a political-data firm, calculated on Oct. 24 that 55% of those early voters were Democrats, while less than 34.5% were Republicans. In Pennsylvania in 2020, more than half the ballots cast were either mail-in or absentee….