While it is a good thing that Ronna Romney McDaniel is no longer running the Republican National Committee, after the 2020 presidential election and the 2022 midterms, she understood that as long as Democrats were the only party embracing early voting, they’d always have an advantage.
“Our voters need to vote early,” McDaniel said in December 2022. “I have said this over and over again. There were many in 2020 saying, ‘Don’t vote by mail, don’t vote early.’ And we have to stop that and understand that if Democrats are getting ballots in for a month, we can’t expect to get it all done in one day.”
Without a doubt, universal mail-in voting is terrible and should be destroyed, but if the past few election cycles have proven anything, it is that Democrats have given themselves a major advantage in elections by embracing early voting. It not only helps them bank votes before the election, but it also gives them an advantage on Election Day itself. And it’s no coincidence that mail-in votes come in and save the day for them when they’re behind.
“You have to play the game by the rules that are existing. That means, for example, if you want Generation Z voters you’ve got to be on TikTok, even if in fact in the long run we may abolish TikTok as a Chinese communist device,” Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said after the 2022 midterms. “It means that you have to recognize early voting. It doesn’t do Republicans any good to save their TV money until October if they’ve had a third of the vote come in in September.”
Like it or not, if we’re not playing by the same rules as they are, we’re bound to continue to lose. Unfortunately, the new RNC, with Trump’s hand-picked leadership, doesn’t see that. Upon taking control of the RNC, newly elected chairman Michael Whatley, co-chair Lara Trump, and chief of operations Chris LaCivita not only cleaned house in an attempt to restructure the RNC, but they have also killed the GOP’s “Bank Your Vote” program.
The senior leadership has been almost entirely replaced or reassigned, while dozens of lower-ranking officials including state directors were either fired or told to reapply for their jobs. A nationwide network of community outreach centers, once a fixture of the party’s efforts to attract minority voters, will be shuttered or refocused on get-out-the-vote efforts. The much heralded “Bank Your Vote” program, aimed at getting Republicans to vote early, will shift to a “Grow The Vote” program focused more on expanding the party’s outreach to less likely Trump voters.
This is not good. Voter outreach is important, but strategically speaking, by ceding the advantage of early voting to the Democrats, Republicans are bound to continue to see winnable elections decided by votes that Democrats have banked in advance. We saw this in 2022 when John Fetterman’s poll numbers tanked after his disastrous debate with Dr. Mehmet Oz, but his performance was virtually irrelevant because so many had already voted.
"We saw this again in the race to replace George Santos. Republicans once again only showed up on election day, and then a big snowstorm killed them. At some point, they've got to get it through their thick skulls to embrace early voting and mail voting and go all-in on stuff that they might think is fraudulent. But if Democrats are going to do it, Republicans must do it too,” GOP Strategist John Feehery told RealClearPolitics. "People don't show up when it's raining, so Republicans have to get it through their thick skulls that they have to embrace all these things."
If the RNC doesn’t rethink this decision, it could give Joe Biden a much-needed lifeline in November.
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