Republicans did something for this election that they avoided in the previous one, and it appears to have been a deciding factor in creating not only a red wave but also a red tsunami.
Party leaders, including then-President Donald Trump, spoke against early voting in the 2020 election, but in 2024, they encouraged it, and it paid massive dividends.
The decision to encourage early voting assisted the GOP in securing low-propensity voters and giving President-elect Trump a historic victory that made him only the second person in history to be elected to two non-consecutive terms as President of the United States, the other being Grover Cleveland, who served from 1885 to 1889 and from 1893 to 1897.
Pollster Scott Rasmussen appeared on the “John Solomon Reports” podcast on Wednesday, where he explained how the new strategy assisted Republicans in a historic victory, Just The News reported.
“I heard from a lot of Republicans who said, you know, ‘I don’t like early voting, I don’t think we should do this, but we have to win if we want to change the rules.’ So, you know, I don’t think this is an issue that’s going to go away, but it has changed the game,” he said.
“This idea of early voting is a relatively new phenomenon,” the pollster said. “When I started polling, it just didn’t exist except for absentee ballots. And in 2020, because of the pandemic, it took on a new form in ways that we never could have imagined just a couple of decades back.
“But Republicans now are totally in the game, and I think it changes it,” he said. “And you know, we’re talking about some of these races are still going to be very, very close, and if you just assume that a small fraction of those early voters might have missed voting on Election Day – I mean, it happens people wake up, they plan to vote, and they’re sick, or something is happening at work – so those getting those votes banked early is one of the keys to this victory. Again, you go back to the fundamentals of the economy, a couple of other issues that supported it, but the tactical part of early voting was another contributing factor to this victory.”
Former Republican New York congressman Lee Zeldin spoke to Just The News and said that the group America First Works focused on “low-propensity voters, no propensity voters, people who didn’t even vote in 2020 but we knew that they were going to vote for President Trump if they showed up, and we got them out.”
“What started in an effort with America First Works targeting 19 counties became a Project 47 at the end of the day, expanding to” 47 counties “in these battleground states, knocking on doors – not just dropping off literature and walking, but having conversations,” he added.
Zeldin also said that the planning started during an April meeting that included “over 50 conservative groups, over 80 conservative leaders” to talk about “what we needed to do with the ground game, what we need to do to secure the vote, litigation, and lawfare.”
“We knocked on many millions of doors, having those conversations, as I mentioned, all across all the battleground states, with what was 47 counties at the end of the day,” the former Congressman said. “We were registering voters, 10s of 1000s of new voters.”
“How great was it, looking at the early voting numbers in all seven of the battleground states, President Trump doing better going into election day than he was four years earlier,” he said, as he mentioned that they “were working as closely as we were allowed to with the Trump campaign” and the RNC.