After RNC takeover, Trump team kills effort to encourage early voting that he once backed
Republicans had been mounting a national effort to encourage their base to catch up to Democrats in early voting.
The national Republican Party, newly under the control of former President Donald Trump, has reportedly abandoned a major nationwide push to get voters to cast their ballots early. That effort had been endorsed by Trump, though he had also spread baseless claims that early voting was unfair and dangerous.
On March 8, the Republican National Committee replaced Chair Ronna McDaniel with Trump’s handpicked choice, former North Carolina Republican Party Chair Michael Whatley. His team also placed Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump as the party’s co-chair and his senior campaign strategist Chris LaCivita as chief operating officer.
The Washington Post reported that in addition to laying off staff and eliminating an outreach program designed to win over minority voters, Trump’s team had come in and immediately canceled the RNC’s ongoing early voting efforts, instead opting for a new program to encourage unlikely Trump voters to back him.
In recent years, as Democrats encouraged voters to take advantage of vote-by-mail and in-person early-voting options, Trump attacked the practice and discouraged his supporters from participating. Though he has himself voted by mail repeatedly, Trump falsely claimed in 2020 that the elections were rigged against him because some states offered an automatic vote-by-mail option. “The ballots are going to be a disaster for our country,” he told reporters that September. “You’re going to have problems with the ballots like nobody has ever seen before.”
The proportion of Democratic voters participating in early voting has gone up significantly in recent years, which has proven to be an advantage in cases like the Feb. 13, 2024, special election in New York’s 3rd Congressional District, where an Election Day snowstorm affected in-person turnout.
In June 2023, McDaniel launched a nationwide “Bank Your Vote” campaign to try to close the early-voting gap. “If we don’t vote early, we’re giving the Democrats a head start,” she said in a video announcement. “But when Republicans vote early, we win.”
The party posted a Montana-focused webpage urging the state’s Republican voters to bank their votes before Election Day. “Absentee ballot requests must be mailed or dropped off at your county election office,” the site says. “Absentee Ballot requests are already available in Montana. Get ready to Bank Your Vote by requesting your Absentee Ballot TODAY.”
“If we learned one thing in the last election cycle in 2022, it’s that we need to turn Election Day into election month,” Republican Sen. Steve Daines, chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said in a June 2023 press call:. “We’re going to be encouraging our voters to bank their votes early. That will give us a competitive edge in some of these critical races, which they’re going to be several of them in the 2024 Senate map. Republicans need to take advantage of all voting methods in each state, just like the Democrats have done.”
Trump himself made a Bank Your Vote campaign video, posted online in June 2023. “Go to BankYourVote.com to sign up and commit to voting early,” he told viewers. “We must defeat the far left at their own game or our country will never recover from this disastrous, crooked Biden administration.”
Trump contradicted that message two days later, telling right-wing radio host Jeff Fredericks: “We should have one-day voting, we should have paper ballots, and we should have voter ID, and you’d have honest elections. And that’s what we should have. When you see these votes where they take 42 days and they have ballots sitting all over the place, it’s a disgrace. We’re like a third-world nation.”
This February, Trump said on Fox News, “If you have mail-in voting, you automatically have fraud.”
