Republicans, It’s Time To Get Our Act Together On Early And Mail-In Voting

In the months that followed, experts with crystal balls declared emphatically, “The red wave is coming!” They were right to credit a perfect storm. The party that is out of power has a history of performing well in a midterm. President Joe Biden’s approval rating was underwater, and working-class families were suffering from the highest inflation rate in more than 40 years. The Republicans lost a seat in Pennsylvania and won a narrow majority at the House. 

What caused the alleged red tsunami to become a scarlet trickle of voters? The Republican Party failed to adopt a national early voting and mail-in voting strategy. Kari lake would be almost certain to become governor today, if Republicans had used mail-in and in-person voting in Arizona like they did in Florida.

Election integrity has been a major concern of voters since 2020. Although the consensus was that Republicans should vote in person on Election Day in 2020, it backfired in 2022. 30 percent Many polling stations in Maricopa County reported issues with their machines. Conservative voters who waited until last day to vote were disenfranchised due to the confusion. Lake lost the election by 17,000 votes. If Republicans had voted early, they wouldn’t have encountered these problems. They would have been more likely to win the election and get more Republicans to go to the polls.

Nevada’s Republican senatorial candidate Adam Laxalt was defeated by just 8,000 votes. He only received 490,388 votes, despite there being 654,145 registered Republicans. If we assume that not a single independent vote was cast for Laxalt, this means that 163,757 registered Republicans were not mobilized to vote for their party’s candidate. When every registered Republican in Nevada had a ballot in their mailbox 20 days before the election, and ballot harvesting is entirely legal under state law, there is no excuse for not achieving near-record Republican turnout — especially in a state that was forecasting snow and inclement weather on Election Day.

Republican officials didn’t use every electoral tool in their favor, and Republican voters were the ones who suffered.

They are not getting the point. All of the post-mortems which cite candidate quality for Pennsylvania’s loss, miss the point. Mehmet Oz, Republican senatorial nominee, had already debated with his opponent. more than 500,000 Pennsylvanians had already sent in their absentee or mail-in ballots. Of those ballots, 407,062 were returned to registered Democrats while 107,086 were returned to Republicans. It didn’t matter that Oz received more votes on Election Day because Democrats were locking in votes and chasing ballots 50 days prior. 

With 50 days of early voting available, it is not surprising that more than 1,000,000 registered Republicans did not vote by Election Day. Voters and activists must be furious at these failures, and vow to never waste another day of early voting.

Republican voters should vote as quickly as possible

*As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases