Nothing New Under the Sun
There’s a lot of whining and bellyaching among the neo-GOP kids who think Twitter is real life and every bit of their wisdom is new and shiny. They’re upset about ballot harvesting and how politics used to be the art of persuasion and now it is all about the process and mechanics of collecting absentee ballots and early voting.
What in the actual hell?!
That’s what campaigning has always been about. I should know. In a former life, I was an elections lawyer, ran congressional, state, and local campaigns, and served as an attorney for a president’s campaign.
It’s what we did and the GOP did it way better than the Democrats.
Sure, yeah, it is not precisely the same now with lengthy early voting. But the mechanics are not that different. In fact, Georgia, Louisiana, and Florida, among other states, saw the GOP master the game. The GOP in Miami-Dade trounced the Democrats. In Georgia, the GOP wound up winning the early vote. For the first time ever, Louisiana Republicans beat Democrats in early voting — again, for the first time ever.
On top of that, in Arizona and Pennsylvania, the state GOPs are culpable because they went all in on election conspiracy lies and sold those lies so hard to the GOP base that the base was scared even to engage. It was ridiculous political malpractice.
All the young bucks who are new at politics think this is some major thing the Democrats do (and do nefariously) that the GOP doesn’t know how to do. Actually, what happened is the former President told everyone not to trust early voting, and Republicans then decided to stop doing it.
The Bush team, like the Trump team, lost their first election’s popular vote, but won the Electoral College. In 2004, the Bush team won the popular vote and the Electoral College because it set out to master the absentee balloting game and blew it out of the water. They found people who sat out 2000. They got the registered and got their absentee ballot requests in. They stayed on the and monitored the flow. They got others out on election day. The Bushies were more competent than the present bunch of GOP leaders at the mechanics and fundamentals of vote collection.
They worked to persuade undecideds while engaging in the mechanics and processes of vote turnout. That’s ballot harvesting and vote building.
As an aside, it is a bit ridiculous to hear some of the whiners claim they have been persuading people. Your live streams and Twitter threads are not really persuading people, and your antics are rather offputting to a lot of people.
As a second aside, why the hell are GOP donors investing in all these college GOP groups when Gen Z is voting 90% Democrat?! Shouldn’t we realize that means the groups are failing and retool them or defund them for something else? Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of Young America’s Foundation. They do great, great work building community on college campuses. But some of the groups out there clearly are not converting or even building an army of activists to do the door-to-door ballot harvesting the GOP needs. We need more Young America’s Foundation-style groups and less cloistered conservative keg parties and hedonism.
Back to the main point now.
If the GOP puts its mind to it, it can engage like the Democrats in ballot harvesting, targeting, persuasion, and the raw mechanics of capturing an early vote. It is totally possible.
But to do so, the GOP has to stop having a defeatist attitude and also stop screaming that we need to undo early voting. You’re more likely to put out the sun than reverse early voting.
Grow up. Grow a pair. Kill the grift. And get to work.
So freaking true. We can get back to that if we try.
It's not "whining," to complain that the election rules that were changed just before the 2020 election by lawyers such as Mark Elias and others featuring ballot harvesting and month-long early mail-in voting. And, it's not counter-productive to promote a 48-hour "Election Day" and voter ID. The method that Democrats seem to have perfected in the states they control serves to further divide the citizenry. I believe a good campaign to revert to a shorter voting schedule and other such fixes would be a positive not a negative for the Republican Party. And I'm not whining about it; I'm furious that it's come to this!
In 2004 I showed up to work at GOP headquarters and they gave me a job. The place was packed! During the Romney campaign-nothing!
I think during Trump we got used to him doing it all with huge rallies.
Time for the grassroots to get to work and mobilize the vote again. Count me in.