One of the key takeaways from the recent midterm elections was that Republicans need to continue making gains in pre-Election Day voting. Despite what the mainstream media might say, Republicans did have an apparatus to encourage pre-Election Day voting and ballot harvesting last cycle and guess what – we were pretty good at it.
In states like Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Montana, North Carolina and New Hampshire, Republicans had a higher ballot return rate than Democrats. Yes, you read that right. Even in states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, Republicans closed the ballot return rate gap within a 1-point margin.
While more Democrat voters may have voted before Election Day in those states than Republicans, the fact is that when Republicans vote early or by mail, we do exceptionally well.
I applaud the Republican National Committee, alongside the NRSC and NRCC, for launching the Bank Your Vote campaign, a nationwide effort to bolster absentee, early in-person and even ballot harvesting in states where it's legal. The RNC’s ecosystem-wide plan will educate and activate Pre-Election Day voting using every tool in the toolbox, from digital and data analytics, to ground game efforts, to protecting the vote with Election Integrity and a comprehensive strategic messaging approach.
The goal is simple – to encourage our voters to not only bank their vote, but to prove that their votes are secure once doing so. Last cycle, the RNC recruited and activated over 80,000 poll watchers and poll workers to ensure transparency in our election process, and that work is already underway in 2024. We hope that once a voter casts their ballot, they will take it one step further and sign up to be a poll worker or poll watcher to renew trust in our elections.
A benefit of having a strong national party apparatus is that while the RNC is fighting in the courts to get rid of bad election laws, like Brnovich vs. DNC, the Party can also push towards beating Democrats at their own game. Just look at California, now-Congressman John Duarte (CA-13) won his race by just 564 votes, and that was in part because of the joint effort between the RNC and the California Republican Party to chase ballots. We saw similar results in Montana’s first congressional district when Republicans elected Congressman Ryan Zinke.
The benefits to pre-Election Day voting are both that it cuts costs and guarantees votes – both crucial to any candidate’s victory. We need our most reliable voters to cast their ballots before Election Day, not only to substantially close the gap with Democrats on Pre-Election Day ballots, but also so that the campaign and ecosystems’ resources can be spent towards targeting lower propensity voters to turn out. The way RNC Data works is that once a voter casts their ballot, they are taken out of the voter targeting universes our campaigns use to drive turnout. This would save our candidates, and really the entire ecosystem, invaluable time, and resources during those crucial final weeks of a campaign.
RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel summed it up best by saying, “we don’t want to wait till the 4th quarter to start scoring touchdowns when you have four quarters to put points on the board.”
The Republican Party is united behind Bank Your Vote, and with well over a year to go until the presidential election, we are putting our eventual nominee in the best position to beat Joe Biden come November 2024.
Katie Walsh Shields is a political and public affairs consultant in Washington, DC, with more than 15 years of experience working at the highest levels of national politics and government, including serving as White House Deputy Chief of Staff and as Chief of Staff to the Republican National Committee.
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