Early Voting Gave Trump, Republicans Edge For Massive Victories
For this election, Republicans embraced a strategy they had largely avoided in the previous one, and it proved instrumental in creating not just a “red wave” but a “red tsunami.”
While in 2020 party leaders, including then-President Donald Trump, discouraged early voting, the GOP in 2024 took a different approach, encouraging it, and the results were significant.
This move to promote early voting helped Republicans mobilize “low-propensity voters” and contributed to President-elect Trump’s historic win, making him only the second person in U.S. history, after Grover Cleveland, to be elected to two non-consecutive terms as president.
Pollster Scott Rasmussen appeared on the “John Solomon Reports” podcast on Wednesday and explained how this strategic shift was pivotal in Republicans’ historic victory, Just The News reported.
“I heard from a lot of Republicans who said, you know, ‘I don’t like early voting, I don’t think we should do this, but we have to win if we want to change the rules,’” he noted. “So, you know, I don’t think this is an issue that’s going to go away, but it has changed the game.”
Rasmussen described early voting as “a relatively new phenomenon,” explaining, “When I started polling, it just didn’t exist except for absentee ballots. And in 2020, because of the pandemic, it took on a new form in ways that we never could have imagined just a couple of decades back.”
“But Republicans now are totally in the game, and I think it changes it,” he added. “And you know, we’re talking about some of these races are still going to be very, very close, and if you just assume that a small fraction of those early voters might have missed voting on Election Day – I mean, it happens, people wake up, they plan to vote, and they’re sick, or something is happening at work – so getting those votes banked early is one of the keys to this victory. Again, you go back to the fundamentals of the economy, a couple of other issues that supported it, but the tactical part of early voting was another contributing factor to this victory.”
Former Republican New York Congressman Lee Zeldin told Just The News that America First Works concentrated on “low-propensity voters, no-propensity voters, people who didn’t even vote in 2020 but we knew that they were going to vote for President Trump if they showed up, and we got them out.”
“What started in an effort with America First Works targeting 19 counties became a Project 47 at the end of the day, expanding to” 47 counties “in these battleground states, knocking on doors – not just dropping off literature and walking, but having conversations,” he explained.
Zeldin added that planning for the effort began during an April meeting that brought together “over 50 conservative groups, over 80 conservative leaders” to discuss “what we needed to do with the ground game, what we need to do to secure the vote, litigation, and lawfare.”
“We knocked on many millions of doors, having those conversations, as I mentioned, all across all the battleground states, with what was 47 counties at the end of the day,” Zeldin stated. “We were registering voters, tens of thousands of new voters.”
“How great was it, looking at the early voting numbers in all seven of the battleground states, President Trump doing better going into Election Day than he was four years earlier,” he continued, adding that they “were working as closely as we were allowed to with the Trump campaign” and the Republican National Committee.