Donald Trump is urging Republican voters to vote early, whether in person or by mail.
- “ABSENTEE VOTING, EARLY VOTING, AND ELECTION DAY VOTING ARE ALL GOOD OPTIONS,” he posted on Truth Social.
- “REPUBLICANS MUST MAKE A PLAN, REGISTER, AND VOTE!”
Axios reports that in Pennsylvania, three Republican groups including the top fundraising committee for Republican legislative campaigns spent $1.5 million in March and April to organize conservatives to vote by mail. It also notes that those groups — the Republican State Leadership Committee PAC, Keystone Renewal PAC and The Sentinel Action Fund — will spend at least $8.5 million more on the campaign before November. The groups note that our troops have trusted mail-in voting for decades.
Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., appeared in ads for the effort to get Republicans to vote early. “Pennsylvania, I need you to join the mail-in voting list today,” he said on camera, before pointing to a website, SkipTheLinePA.vote.
In Pennsylvania, Republicans have seen increases in vote-by-mail requests and returned ballots in the recent primary compared to the 2022 primary, but early GOP votes still trailed Democratic votes by a substantial amount. In a leaked memo, the architects of the Republican mail-in campaign in Pennsylvania acknowledged the divide: “Our program never sought to overtake Democrats in vote-by-mail voting outright … our goal has always been to continue to chip away at their advantage and narrow the gap” to enable a victory when combined with the fact that Republicans get a higher percentage of the vote on election day itself.
Encouraging Republicans to vote early makes sense, because when voters don’t vote before election day, there is always a chance they will fail to vote on election day, due to some unexpected obstacle (such as family issues, very bad weather, or an unexpected mess at work) or due to just forgetting to vote. So early votes increase a party’s chances of winning.
