While there was lots of handwringing over the decision to bypass much of the Republican GOTV infrastructure, the results seem to be speaking for themselves.
The new get out the vote efforts have largely been handled privately rather than by the Party. Elon Musk is said to have played a big part in all of this. This has cause a lot of concern on the part of old school Republicans.
So how is this playing out?
Apparently one of the main goals was specifically go after low propensity voters who typically would be ignored. This was considered high risk and low reward. However, polling suggests that the electorate will include a larger percentage of voters who have never voted before and that those voters favor Donald Trump by double figures. The voters being targeted are not necessarily to be confused with young voters who just became eligible, but rather older voters who largely have not voted in previous elections.
There is plenty of evidence that this outreach has been at least somewhat successful based on the early voting numbers and where those votes are coming from. It seems more than likely that there plenty of early Trump voters who otherwise would not have voted on election day. This seems like a win win. Otherwise, getting consistent election day voters to vote early is little more than robbing from Peter to pay Paul. Do you prefer the bird in hand? Of course, but getting the bird in the bush to vote early when it was likely that bird otherwise just hides in the bush past election day seems like a better strategy than pushing the bird in hand to vote early.
Meanwhile, you are hearing about good early voting numbers for Republicans in several battleground states including the must win states of North Carolina and Pennsylvania. In North Carolina there were more GOP cast votes than Democrat votes, which apparently is unprecedented. The buzz appears that early voting outreach (on both sides) has been heavily concentrated on areas damaged by the hurricane, which is more Republican than Democrat. If this is true, then both sides may have been assisting Trump in his quest to take that state and pushes back on the concept that federal hurricane relief was slow as an attempt to prevent largely Republicans affected from voting. In Pennsylvania, some are suggesting that the early voting Democratic firewall is at least 100,000 votes lower than Democrats were hoping for at this point, and Republicans are double digits closer to Democrats in that state than they were in 2020.
There is also good early voting news for Republicans in Nevada, which has a massive Democratic GOTV machine. Some are at least appearing shocked at the early voting numbers there. Time will tell how this all holds up or how other states are doing. In my opinion, no news is good news when it comes to early voting as Democrats seem infatuated with showing those numbers and declaring their dominance with loud bravado. Not hearing much of that right now. More hearing about how Democrats are disappointed at the current effort. Either way, Trump does not seem to be suffering much from outsourcing his GOTV efforts and quite possibly this is just more legacy Republicans upset with him upsetting the apple cart and involving people like Elon Musk.
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