Mail-in vote processing in Lancaster, Pa., Nov. 8.
Photo:
Sue Dorfman/Zuma Press
If there was a sense of doom among smart Republicans in the runup to
Herschel Walker’s
Georgia Senate defeat on Tuesday, it’s because they understood he’d already been beaten. The evidence sat in a towering pile of mail-in ballots.
The GOP did plenty wrong in this midterm, and any honest autopsy would reckon with its decisions to saddle itself again with subpar Senate candidates (remember 2010?) and to tie its fortunes again to
(remember 2020?). But the other big takeaway: Republicans got whupped by Democrats’ early-voting game and may be years behind in a major shift in turnout tactics. The party spent more time grousing over Democrats’ 2020 voting changes than it did asking itself why its opponents were so laser-focused on making mail-in and early voting easier.
It turns out that 720 hours (the month Democrats use to mobilize early voters) is more than 72 hours (the three days Republicans use to mobilize their Election Day voters). Top Republicans have finally discovered arithmetic. “Our voters need to vote early,” Republican National Committee Chairman
Ronna McDaniel
said this week on Fox News. “There were many in 2020 saying, ‘Don’t vote by mail, don’t vote early,’ and we have to stop that and understand that if Democrats are getting ballots in for a month, we can’t expect to get it all done in day.”
The Georgia Senate results sum it up. This week’s runoff saw all-time midterm records in both early and absentee voting in a midterm. Some 1.9 million people cast their ballot prior to Tuesday, and Democrat
Raphael Warnock
won 64% of those voting absentee and 58% of those voting early. Yes, Mr. Walker had a good election day, winning 57% of votes cast Tuesday. But turnout for the day was 1.6 million, or 46% of the total vote.
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