I previously covered how early voting numbers don’t look good for Democrats. I’ve also said I’m not entirely convinced that the early voting numbers are a viable metric to predict how Trump will do, but a former Obama campaign manager calls the number “scary” for Kamala. However, some say that the GOP is merely cannibalizing their in-person Election Day vote. I don’t buy that argument, and I’ll explain why.
For sure, it’s really hard to say what the early vote is telling us. As you may recall, 2020 was an anomaly because of the pandemic, and we don’t really have a solid baseline to judge 2024 off of. Still, the voices insisting the GOP may be “cannibalizing” its Election Day vote are there and cannot be ignored. In essence, this theory posits that by encouraging early voting, Republicans risk losing their Election Day advantage by simply shifting their usual turnout, not expanding it. Yet, this argument doesn’t hold water, and it’s worth examining why.
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First, it’s a bit rich to question the GOP’s early voting gains as potentially detrimental when Democrats faced no such scrutiny in 2020 or 2022. In both of those elections, Democrats aggressively pushed early voting, encouraged voters to turn out as soon as possible, and received positive coverage for it. There were no widespread claims that Democrats were at risk of “cannibalizing” their Election Day turnout, only approval that they were effectively mobilizing their base. In fact, it really worked to their advantage in the Pennsylvania Senate race. John Fetterman’s candidacy crashed after his disastrous debate performance against Mehmet Oz, but they had already banked enough early votes that it didn’t matter.
So why now, when Republicans are making similar efforts, is early voting seen as a problem?
This “cannibalization” theory ignores the very real benefits the GOP gains from a robust early voting campaign. By banking early votes, Republicans are strategically freeing up resources to focus on get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts on Election Day itself. With a significant number of votes already banked, Republicans can devote more resources to their get-out-the-vote efforts on Election Day—just as Democrats have. This logistical edge could make the difference in tightly contested states, where every vote counts.
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Also, Republicans have been planning for this for a long time. They’ve known they’d have to embrace early voting to compete with Democrats, and their strategy has been to target low-propensity voters. And, regardless of whether they're banking the votes of those low-propensity voters or the votes of reliable Republicans, they're still freeing up resources for their Election Day ground game.
That's a strategy that Democrats have used successfully. Remember, the Democrats’ 2020 push for early voting showed how a strong early turnout strategy can work; the theory that they were “cannibalizing” their own Election Day voters to their own detriment never seemed to come up. In reality, their early vote strategy is the reason why Joe Biden won. After 2020, the Republican National Committee knew they had to make changes. They've given us plenty of reason to believe they've taken this situation seriously enough to do it right.
