Early voting skepticism causes headaches for GOP heading into 2024
Republican leaders are urging their base to take a less skeptical stance on early and mail-in voting after the party suffered significant losses in the midterms through heavily relying on in-person voting on Election Day.
The GOP’s latest message on the matter marks a change in tone for the party, which was heavily influenced by former President Trump stoking skepticism about early and mail-in voting in 2020. Trump’s message played a role in costing Republicans the Senate in Georgia in 2020 and also impacted their Senate loss in the state two years later.
However, the party will have work to do to convince its base to accept the voting practices. According to a study from Pew Research conducted last year, 62 percent of Republicans said voters should only be allowed to vote early or absentee if they have a documented reason.
A number of prominent Republicans have spoken out about the party’s pitfalls when it comes to early voting, including Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel.
“While the RNC invested millions of dollars in trying to persuade voters to vote early, our ecosystem must expand our voter turnout window, change the narrative on early voting, and examine the impact of absentee ballot and early vote chasing in states like Florida and North Carolina, as well as ballot harvesting in California, as a model for the rest of the country,” McDaniel wrote in a Fox News op-ed earlier this month.
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/3786547-early-voting-skepticism-causes-headaches-for-gop-heading-into-2024/
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