A coalition of Republican spending groups are throwing everything they have into convincing Republicans to vote early.
Coplay, Pa. – Back in April, the Republican State Leadership Committee began featuring high-profile digital and peer-to-peer ads urging Republican voters to embrace mail-in ballots. “If you’re working a double shift or family responsibilities prevent you from voting on Election Day, Joe Biden wins,” Donald Trump Jr. says in one of the 15-second spots. “Pennsylvania, I need you to join the mail-in voting list today.”
On the ground here Monday evening, the former president’s eldest son made an in-person plea to Keystone State voters — bank your vote early before Pennsylvania’s October 29 early and vote-by-mail deadline.
Don Jr. is one of many high-profile surrogates that a coalition of Republican spending groups — the Sentinel Action Fund, Republican State Leadership Committee PAC, and Keystone Renewal PAC — have leveraged in recent months as part of a joint effort this cycle to juice early voter turnout among Pennsylvania Republicans.
The three groups’ combined budget this cycle has already surpassed $16 million.
“Our focus has been on the Senate,” Sentinel Action Fund President Jessica Anderson said in an interview with National Review. “But I know that there were a number of conversations with the former president and on the House side to really ensure that candidates themselves talked about absentee/early vote and directed their state GOPs to create their own programs around it. The coalition and nationalized effort to support absentee-early vote has been remarkable.”
Anderson explained that earlier this year, the three groups settled around three main electoral objectives they felt they must meet here this cycle, otherwise “Republicans would continue to lose.” The first goal was to chip away at the permanent absentee list in Pennsylvania. The second was to change the message and culture surrounding absentee early vote. And the third was to increase the percentage growth from absentee requests to the ballot returns.
Regarding the first goal, the coalition said in an October 30 memo sent to interested parties that the groups have “produced over 365,000 vote-by-mail requests from first time mail voters” and “added nearly 240,000 Republicans to the permanent vote-by-mail list,” a remarkable feat for Republicans given how wary their voters have been about non–Election Day voting after Trump’s rhetoric surrounding the 2o20 election. The early vote numbers look similarly promising for Republicans nationwide.
Convincing Republicans to cast votes early and by mail first required a culture change: Trump himself has spent much of his political career maligning early and mail-in voting as vulnerable to fraud and manipulation. Indeed, even with the significant Republican spending effort to promote non–Election Day voting, some GOP voters remain hesitant to cast their votes early, on the mistaken belief that they won’t be counted, according to a Pennsylvania GOP canvasser who spoke to NR last week.
“The initial reaction is, oh, no, no, no, no, we’re not doing that” because of “what happened last time” in 2020, when Trump told his supporters that the election was stolen. People are “very cautious” about voting early, the volunteer said.
While the campaign worked to get Trump behind the effort, this coalition recruited Don Jr. and celebrities like mommy blogger Jessica Reed Kraus and athlete and activist Riley Gaines to flood conservative social media with familiar faces supportive of the effort. Part of the strategy meant leaning into arguments such as, “if it’s good for our guys overseas, it’s good for us,” and that voting early would help overcome any future margin of fraud. Trump of course took that to mean Republicans must “swamp the vote” before Election Day so his victory would be “too big to rig.”
“With the messaging in place, you start to create this echo chamber around voters where they’re seeing it from faces that they trust, or celebrities that they are influenced by and listen to,” Anderson explained in an interview.
Working from data the coalition collected from the Republican gubernatorial elections of Glenn Youngkin and Brian Kemp, these groups calculated they needed upwards of 30 individual touches for these low-propensity voters to turn out, including through mail, digital ads, text messages, live phone calls, and door knocks. After kickstarting that effort in late spring, the coalition has reached more than 50 touches in Pennsylvania per voter for this target list.
Throughout the cycle, the coalition has shared its voter file data with the Trump campaign and the Elon Musk–bankrolled group America PAC. The Sentinel Action Fund has also shared its door-knocking data this cycle with the GOP Senate campaign of Dave McCormick and the RSLC.
“From our target universe over 380,000 voters have requested a vote-by-mail ballot,” the coalition said in its October 30 memo, adding that this is an overperformance of 212 percent compared to the Election Day–only target voters. “Beyond breaking our request and permanent list sign up goals, we have seen the Democrats vote-by-mail request advantage shrink by a staggering 514,000 requests and to date, their vote by-mail return advantage is only 379,000 votes.”
This all comes as the GOP presidential campaign continues to catch flak for relying on what it calls “Trump Force Captains,” and outsourcing its ground game to a number of outside groups. Privately, Republican operatives say this is a high-risk, low-reward strategy, especially when a presidential campaign cannot directly oversee its door knockers and hold them accountable for meeting objectives.
Anderson insists this is a “misinformed” view. “You need to have a campaign that is spending their dollars to create maximum efficiency,” she tells NR in an interview. “And in a world where the television costs are as astronomical as they are, campaigns get a better price on television than we as an outside group would, whereas we can get our doors down to $3.85 a door in some places in Pennsylvania right now.”
“We can get that labor price down because we have a blended program of volunteers and paid knockers,” she added.
Whether or not Republicans pull off victories up and down the ballot here next week, this early-vote message has resonated on the ground with grassroots volunteers.
“The goal is to reach low-propensity voters who want people who normally wouldn’t make it out to the polls to try and get out and vote early,” says Don Jr. rally attendee Julia Leusner, a Trump Force Captain and Quakertown, Pa., resident. She has knocked on hundreds of doors in her community and says grassroots Republicans are squarely focused this cycle on banking votes early to avoid situations where “maybe something comes up” on November 5 for some voters “and then they say, ‘I’m just not going to vote,’ or ‘I’m not going to go wait in Election Day lines.’”
“Our goal from the beginning in Pennsylvania was to cut into the Democrats’ mail-in lead — and we’ve drastically surpassed expectations,” says Dee Duncan, president of the Republican State Leadership Committee PAC. “Thanks to the success of this Republican vote-by-mail program alongside our partners and President Trump, Republicans up and down the ballot are heading into Election Day stronger than ever.”