New Data Suggests Republicans Are Ignoring Trump’s Early Vote Rhetoric

The numbers: While last presidential election cycle, Democrats held a 22-point early voting edge in the battleground states of Florida, Georgia, Virginia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and North Carolina, that lead’s now dwindled to just 12 points.

Context: The Republican Party has reversed course on skepticism toward early voting, spending millions to get GOP voters to embrace the practice, following concerns that Donald Trump’s criticism of early voting would cost the party electorally.

Bubba’s Two Cents

As the journalist James Suroweicki has said, the early voting trend might be explained by Democrats in 2020 voting “by mail in massive numbers because they took Covid more seriously than Republicans did.” It’s possible these Republican early voters are people who would have cast ballots in person in the past, and so this isn’t necessarily a sign of a spike in enthusiasm for Trump. But all else being equal, Republicans are probably happy Trump’s rhetoric doesn’t appear to have seriously dinged the party’s early vote turnout.