Early voting begins on Friday in Virginia, where every seat in the state senate and house of delegates will be up for grabs in some of the most consequential US elections of 2023. The process has found a somewhat surprising champion in Virginia: the Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin.
In previous years, the idea of a sitting governor rallying fellow members of his party to vote early would have been considered routine. But Donald Trump’s baseless claims about widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election, which the former president often blamed on early and absentee voting, have upended the Republican party’s conventional campaign strategy. As Republicans seek to take full control of the Virginia legislature in November, Youngkin must strike a fine balance between maximizing his party’s turnout without alienating the voters who remain deeply skeptical of early and absentee voting because of Trump’s lies.
Even though Youngkin’s allies in the state legislature have worked to restrict voting access, the governor argued that Republicans must make the most out of voting rules previously enacted by Democrats, which allow Virginians to cast early and no-excuse absentee ballots starting 45 days before an election.
“Democrats put these rules in place while in control of Virginia’s government and have used these rules to their advantage by vastly outpacing Republicans in early and absentee voting,” Youngkin wrote in a USA Today op-ed last month. “We can either continue complaining, or we can recognize reality, beat the left at their own game and win elections.”
Youngkin’s strategy is up against Trump’s lies, which have resonated deeply with Republicans across the country. According to a Pew Research Center survey taken last October, only 37% of midterm voters supporting Republican candidates were confident that absentee or mail-in ballots would be counted accurately, compared with 88% of midterm voters supporting Democratic candidates who said the same. In 2021 alone, 19 states – mostly Republican-controlled – passed 34 laws restricting access to the ballot box, according to a report from the left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice. Those laws included limiting early voting hours, imposing stricter requirements on absentee voting and reducing the use of drop boxes for mail-in ballots.
Despite Republicans’ unease over early voting, some party leaders have attempted to reframe the process as an essential component of their winning strategy for 2023 and 2024. In June, the Republican National Committee launched the “Bank Your Vote” campaign to boost rates of early and absentee voting. Trump himself recorded a video endorsing the campaign, urging his supporters to vote early even as he continued to falsely claim that Democrats “rigged the election against us in 2020”.
Those efforts may be a response to Republicans’ disappointing performance in the 2022 midterm elections, which some strategists blamed on the party’s reluctance to build a robust early voting operation. But few Republicans have embraced early voting more wholeheartedly than Youngkin. The governor partly credits his upset victory in 2021 – a year after Joe Biden carried the state by 10 percentage points – to early voting, and believes that strategy will bear fruit for Republicans again. He launched an initiative, dubbed Secure Your Vote Virginia, to provide Republicans with step-by-step instructions on how to vote by mail or vote early in person.
“I think it’s exactly the right strategy,” Mark Rozell, dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, said of Youngkin’s early voting campaign. “The rules are the rules. And the governor is saying: to be competitive, Republicans have to play along.”
Steve Knotts, chair of the Fairfax county Republican party, acknowledged that many voters he speaks to still prefer casting their ballots in person on election day. But he joined other party leaders in encouraging fellow Republicans to register for an absentee ballot just in case something unexpected arises on election day. If someone receives an absentee ballot but chooses to instead vote in person on 7 November, Virginia law allows them to do so by returning their unopened absentee ballot at their polling place.
Knotts expressed some discomfort with the voting rules enacted by Democrats when they controlled the state legislature, but like Youngkin, he argued that Republicans must still capitalize on the 45-day timeframe to be competitive.
“These are the rules that we have,” Knotts said. “That’s what our local efforts are about is making sure that people have the opportunity to vote under the rules that we have in place. And it’s not just a game that the Democrats play; it’s a game that we all play. Those rules, we need to engage them.”
Youngkin has proved particularly adept at spreading that two-pronged message, which he used to his advantage in 2021. During the gubernatorial race, Youngkin made “election integrity” a focal point of his campaign message, playing off Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud in 2020 even as he simultaneously endorsed early and absentee voting to maximize Republican turnout.
“He would signal to the Trump base without coming right out and saying Trump won the election,” Rozell said. “And that’s just always been his way.”
Even as the Democrats who control the state senate have managed to block much of Youngkin’s policy agenda, the governor has managed to notch some wins for the election doubters among the Republican base. In May, the Youngkin administration joined other Republican states when officials announced Virginia would withdraw from the Electronic Registration Information Center (Eric), a data-sharing system aimed at preventing voter fraud that had become a common target of baseless election conspiracy theories. The withdrawal was all the more notable because Virginia was a founding member of Eric in 2012, when the Republican Bob McDonnell served as governor. On Wednesday, Youngkin announced his administration had instead secured individual data-sharing agreements with five other states and Washington DC to improve the accuracy of Virginia’s voting rolls.
Republicans in the house of delegates have also attempted to roll back the expansion of voting access that Democrats implemented, but those proposals were blocked by the state senate. If Republicans regain full control of the legislature in November, Knotts suggested they may reconsider the timeframe for early voting.
“I’m sure they’re going to look at it,” Knotts said. “I would encourage a review of the 45-day process. I think that’s a bit too long.”
Democrats have now incorporated that possibility into their own campaign messaging, suggesting that Youngkin and his allies will quickly move to curtail access to the ballot box if they are successful in November. The Democratic party of Virginia has also launched its own early voting campaign, a seven-figure operation known as the Majority Project.
“All the voting rights will be under assault from Republicans. Every single Republican, the last two years in the general assembly, voted to roll back all the reforms that the Democratic trifecta made to make voting more easy and more accessible,” said Susan Swecker, chair of the Democratic party of Virginia. “I’ve yet to see [Youngkin] tell a single general assembly member, ‘Don’t vote against restricting voting rights.’”
Considering how many Republicans remain skeptical of early and absentee voting, the issue of “election integrity” could prove unavoidable if the party flips the state senate, Rozell predicted.
“If they have complete control of the government, they cannot ignore it,” Rozell said. “There is an extremely large percentage of Republican identifiers who believe Trump won the election and that there is electoral fraud all over the place and that this problem needs to be fixed.”
