Republicans have spent months and millions of dollars on an effort to push former President Donald J. Trump’s most loyal supporters to change their minds about voting early.
There is some evidence to suggest it’s working.
With polls opening on Tuesday in Wisconsin, some form of early voting has commenced in all seven of the swing states. As of Monday, 17 million people nationwide had already cast a vote — and there are initial indications that Republicans are showing up to the polls or returning absentee ballots with more gusto than in recent years. In many cases, Republican officials and canvassers on the ground are spurring their voters on with the same debunked conspiracy theories about fraud that Mr. Trump has used to sow doubt about the integrity of the count.
“They have done a better job of turning out their voters to vote early,” said Sam Almy, a Democratic political strategist who tracks early ballots in Arizona. “I think they realized that early voting is easy and convenient: It turns out your voters quickly, and they don’t have to gamble on turning out all their voters on Election Day.”
It’s a remarkable turnabout from four years ago, when Mr. Trump had thoroughly demonized every method of voting that didn’t occur in person on Election Day. As states expanded access to mail and absentee voting at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Mr. Trump repeatedly discouraged his voters from taking advantage. He said mail ballots created “chaos and confusion,” and asserted without evidence that it would lead to “election interference by foreign countries.” Many of his supporters believed him, and Joseph R. Biden Jr. won, buoyed by Democratic dominance in early and mail votes.
This year, Mr. Trump has offered a more muddled message on the various methods of voting while others in his party worked overtime to reverse course. The Republican National Committee, with his daughter-in-law Lara Trump now the co-chair, poured resources into programs that would encourage Republican voters to submit ballots early. The former president himself voted early in the Florida Republican primary over the summer.
Even so, Mr. Trump has kept up the attacks. Campaigning in Pennsylvania last month, he called early voting “stupid stuff” — moments after telling rallygoers that they should “start right away.” Earlier this year, he called mail voting “totally corrupt” at a Michigan rally. He told a British interviewer in March that mail-in ballots inevitably lead to “cheating.”
