Republicans are pouring tens of millions of dollars into getting GOP voters to cast ballots before Election Day.
They’re frustrated because Donald Trump keeps getting in the way.
In just the last few weeks, the former president has dismissed early voting as “stupid,” falsely claimed that 20 percent of mail ballots in Pennsylvania are “fraudulent,” suggested mail carriers could “lose hundreds of thousands of ballots, maybe purposefully,” and baselessly accused Democrats of exploiting a program that sends ballots to overseas and military voters to evade citizenship checks.
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.”