[Report]
The Right is Eroding Its Own Voter Turnout by Attacking Early Voting
You might be shocked to learn that the all-out assault on early voting by Trump and his GOP allies has officially backfired.
In the Georgia primary election — which saw Republican voters move to send ultra-MAGA election deniers to posts that will oversee state elections — Democrats outnumbered Republican voters by nearly 151,000 votes, according to unofficial turnout data from the Georgia Secretary of State. That lead started after 580,000 Democrats voted early compared to 430,000 Republicans, a 150,000 person or 15 percentage point difference. GOP voters never closed that early gap, which came even as mail-in voting rates plummeted for both parties.
Georgia’s WABE reported Gov. Brian Kemp said he’s “definitely concerned” about the state’s energetic Democratic base.
It’s not crazy to say the depressed GOP turnout was a predictable, natural outgrowth of the far-right promotion of false election security conspiracies. To promote his categorically untrue claims that U.S. elections are marred by fraud and that non-citizens are voting and illegally affecting election outcomes, Trump has repeatedly targeted mail-in voting. He waited, of course, to launch this full-scale attack until after he finished promoting early and mail-in voting ahead of his own 2024 election.
In March, Trump went so far as to sign an executive order outlawing mail-in ballots for all but a limited group of people. Election officials from Trump’s own party turned on the president and expect the order to be struck down by the courts. Nevermind that Trump himself votes by mail. He is president and has declared that no rules apply to him except those inside his own heart and mind.
Georgia’s turnout results are even more striking because it’s a total reversal of the 2022 primaries, where Republicans cast more mail-in and total ballots than Democrats. Then, former President Joe Biden was in office and post-pandemic inflation galvanized Americans to show their dissatisfaction with the administration at the polls. The opposite is expected to happen this year. Still, the scale of the flip-flop is striking.
At a topline level, Georgia voters broke the state’s early voting record. But Democrats logged a 53% increase in early voting while Republican early voting turnout dropped by 13% compared to 2022, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. Hispanic voters made a major coalition shift. This year, 72% of Hispanic voters were registered Democrats, compared to 47% in 2022. More white and Asian voters shifted their allegiances to the left, too, the AJC reported.
The 15 percentage point partisan difference in early ballots cast this year is the exact same gap Republicans led Democrats by in 2022, when the GOP swept statewide offices, suggesting Democratic enthusiasm could signal danger for the right.
The right’s demonization of mail-in and early voting is not the only counter-productive anti-voting measure the party is pushing. The GOP’s SAVE America Act would require Americans to present a birth certificate or passport before registering to vote. As a result, the right risks alienating its own base: working class, white voters from middle America who don’t have passports and may have limited access to birth certificates, as well as conservative women who’ve married and failed to change their last names on official documents. As we’ve reported before, states who turned out for Trump in 2024 have the largest percentage of residents without passports.
