After years of Republican attacks on voter integrity, GOP leaders on Monday stressed the importance of early voting and how such efforts are critical to their party’s efforts to retain Congress and win the White House next year.

“To win in 2024, we know Republicans need to reach more voters than ever before, and that’s exactly what we’re doing through the ‘Bank Your Vote’ program,” said Jessica Millan Patterson, president of the California Republican Party.

Ronna McDaniel, the chair of the Republican National Committee, was one of several GOP leaders who called the news media Monday to emphasize the importance of early voting, mail-in ballots and collecting ballots for their party’s chances of success next year.

“You can’t expect to win a game if you don’t start scoring until the fourth quarter,” she said. “We cannot allow the Democrats to have an edge on Election Day.”

What went unspoken, however, was why GOP national and state leaders, including House Speaker Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield, had to pressure their supporters to vote early, as they historically did until 2020.

After then-President Trump and other conservative stars falsely claimed that voting by mail allowed elections to be rigged against them, many Republican voters abandoned the practice of a historic shift that likely cost the party seats in the 2020 and 2022 elections, said Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist who wrote From Pandemic to Insurrection: Voting in the 2020 Presidential Election.

McDonald is among electoral analysts who believe GOP voters’ newfound reluctance to cast such votes likely hurt their party’s attempts to control the U.S. Senate, as well as its prospects in a number of tight home and gubernatorial races across the country in the last two election cycles.

“While national and state parties spend millions of dollars encouraging supporters to vote by mail, and some no doubt did, the numbers weren’t there like they were in previous elections, McDonald said. And I think you largely blame or credit Trump for that have to give.

Those attending the press conference did not mention Trump’s name until a reporter asked him how they expected to restore voter confidence while the former president still had doubts about the integrity of such ballots.

McCarthy responded that Trump filmed a video promoting the Bank Your Vote program. “He sees the importance,” the House speaker said.

Trump released the video in late July, about a week after saying during an interview with Fox News that while he supported early voting, people create “fake ballots.”

Given the dominance of left-wing voters in California, the state has not played a major role in influencing the presidential election for

decades

Because the state has firmly supported the Democratic candidates. However, several congressional races in the state remain in play, particularly in Southern California and the Central Valley, and the results could determine which party controls Congress after the 2024 election.

McCarthy and Patterson pointed to a narrow victory for Representative John Duarte in a Modesto district last year as proof that early voting works. President Biden won the district by 11 percentage points. Republicans targeted 25,000 GOP voters who did not vote, and Duarte won the seat by 564 votes.

Historically, Republicans have preferred mail ballots, in part because their party’s supporters are inclined

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being older than Democrats and voting this way allowed them to participate in democracy while avoiding queuing at the polls in states like Florida and Arizona.

Early voting has been an important and substantial asset to Republican campaigns for years, said Tom Bonier, CEO of VoteSmart, a Democratic data company. It was something that Republicans were generally better at. It wasn’t until President Trump told everyone it was fraudulent that it changed. But it changed dramatically.

Leading up to the 2020 election, as more states mailed every voter a ballot due to the pandemic,

honored

voted in these votes as flawed, a scam and designed by Democrats to cost him re-election. He said this would result in the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT election in history, suggested postponing the election and used these false claims as a basis for not accepting the election results.

Republican operatives knew this approach was problematic. In Florida, the state party highlighted a Trump tweet praising absentee ballots while blurring the rest of his statement about how mail-in ballots will lead to the most corrupt election [in] American history.

Top Trump advisers, including son-in-law Jared Kushner, campaign manager Bill Stepien and McCarthy, reportedly tried to convince the then president that mail-in ballots were key to the party’s 2020 effort.

“I’ve been trying to show him…you know who’s most afraid of COVID? Seniors. And if they don’t vote, period, we’re screwed,” McCarthy told Axios in September 2020.

The damage had already been done. Biden supporters reported voting by mail nearly twice as much as those who supported Trump, according to a Pew Research Center survey after the 2020 election. Similar trends likely later affected Georgia’s Senate elections, as well as contests in the states of Arizona and Nevada that were challenged on Election Day due to technology and weather conditions, respectively.

These things obviously happen, Bonier said. But on Election Day, campaigns have much less margin for error.

GOP leaders have tried to warn their party’s voters that unwillingness about voting by mail will cost them at the polls, with limited success. Weeks after the failed attempt to seize California Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2021, Republican lawyers spoke out at their party’s convention arguing that the pro-recall vote was suppressed due to vote conspiracy theories.

There are very good people who surprisingly believe my vote doesn’t count in California, so I’m not going to vote, Orange County GOP chairman Fred Whitaker said during a panel called Jim Crow 2.0 of Common Sense: The National Debate about election integrity laws. In any sport, if you don’t get on the field, you don’t win. And politics is a contact sport, it’s a team sport and we have to get everyone to vote.

During that panel discussion, much like Monday’s press call, no one said that the most vocal and influential person to have promoted such false claims is Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.