Republicans have spent months and millions of dollars on efforts to encourage former President Donald J. Trump’s most loyal supporters to change their minds about early voting.
There’s some evidence to suggest it’s working.
Voting began in Wisconsin on Tuesday, and all seven battleground states have begun some form of early voting. As of Monday, 17 million people nationwide had already cast their votes, and there are early signs that Republicans are showing up to polling places and returning absentee ballots more enthusiastically than in recent years. In many cases, Republican officials and field recruiters are teasing voters with the same debunked conspiracy theories that Mr. Trump has used to cast doubt on the integrity of the tally.
“They did a better job of getting voters to vote early,” said Sam Almy, a Democratic political strategist who tracks early voting in Arizona. “I think they realized that early voting is easy and convenient. It lets you know who’s eligible right away, and you don’t have to bet on whether everyone will vote on Election Day.”
This is a stunning shift from four years ago, when Trump was thoroughly demonizing all forms of voting that weren’t conducted in person on Election Day. As states expanded access to mail-in and absentee voting at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, Mr. Trump repeatedly discouraged voters from using it. He claimed without evidence that mail-in voting would cause “chaos and confusion” and lead to “foreign interference in elections.” Many supporters took him at his word, and Joseph R. Biden Jr. won, buoyed by Democrats’ dominance in early voting and mail-in voting.
This year, Mr. Trump offered an even more mixed message on how to vote, while others in his party worked overtime to change course. The Republican National Committee, co-chaired by his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, has poured resources into a program encouraging Republican voters to submit early ballots. The former president himself voted early in Florida’s Republican primary over the summer.
Still, Trump continues to attack. Campaigning in Pennsylvania last month, he called early voting “an act of stupidity” shortly after telling rallygoers that they “should start now.” Earlier this year, he said at a Michigan rally that mail-in voting is “totally corrupt.” He told a British interviewer in March that postal voting would inevitably lead to “fraud.”
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