OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Just over a month before Election Day, Keystone State Republicans are narrowing the gap with Democrats in mail-in voting, despite challenges such as an anti-Trump Airbnb host evicting ballot-chasers from their accommodations.
After years of skepticism from Donald Trump and Republican voters, the GOP is now fully embracing the mail-in ballot method in a bid to turn Pennsylvania red, investing millions to adopt strategies from the Democrats’ playbook to encourage their voters to cast their ballots by mail, the New York Post noted, adding that the effort appears to be “paying off.”
While Pennsylvania Republicans are still requesting significantly fewer mail-in ballots than Democrats, they are making inroads into the Democrats’ mail-in advantage, which could be crucial in a state that Biden won by just over 80,000 votes in 2020.
Pennsylvania Chase, a grassroots initiative focused on securing mail-in ballots to help Trump capture the state’s 19 electoral votes, analyzed data from the Department of State. They found that just 35 days before Election Day, Republicans in the state had requested approximately 373,000 mail-in ballots.
“While that seems like peanuts next to the nearly 879,000 mail-in ballots Dems have requested, a comparison with previous cycles reveals the Democratic advantage has decreased,” The Post noted further.
At this point in the 2020 election, during the height of the pandemic when mail-in voting nearly doubled, Pennsylvania Democrats had requested nearly 846,000 more ballots than Republicans. By the 2022 midterms, that advantage had decreased to about 546,000 requested mail-in ballots.
This cycle, Republicans have further reduced the Democratic lead to approximately 506,000 requests.
“The momentum is with us,” Pennsylvania Chase founder Cliff Maloney told the outlet regarding the group’s get-out-the-vote efforts. Maloney has deployed 120 paid field organizers across 10 Airbnbs throughout the Commonwealth, aiming to knock on 500,000 doors by November 5 to ensure that the requested mail-in ballots are cast and counted.
“It’s not persuasion. It’s not policy,” Maloney said. “It’s just chase the ballots.”
But the effort has not been without hiccups. Maloney said a Philadelphia Airbnb host last week, for instance, immediately canceled the $5,000 reservation and evicted his seven tenants when they told him, “We chase ballots for Republicans in PA.”
“The guys are in the field extra hours today because they’re pissed off and motivated,” Maloney told The Post, going on to note that his organization “is considering legal action for discrimination while Airbnb investigates the incident — and remains undeterred,” the outlet’s report said.
The former mathematics teacher and president of Young Americans for Liberty knows that Republicans cannot compete with Democrats on raw mail-in votes, but they can increase the GOP’s share.
“If we can get it to 33%, we cannot lose statewide. And we end the mail-in-ballot domination by Democrats,” Maloney told The Post, though he also said his modeling shows Trump could win the state with a lower percentage of mail-in votes.
PA Chase’s data indicates that Republicans are making progress toward their targets, with 26.5% of mail-in ballots requested as of now, with just over a month left until Election Day. In comparison, Republicans were at 23.1% at the same point in 2020 and 18.3% in 2022.
“The gap is closing,” Jondavid Longo, the state director of Early Vote Action in Pennsylvania, told The Post. His is “a grassroots organization focused on registering Republican voters that also encourages mail-in and early voting,” the outlet reported. Longo noted further: “Republicans need to use every tool in their toolkit that Democrats have access to.”
“Democrats embraced no-excuse mail-in voting” in 2020, Maloney noted, adding that Dem voters had more than a month to mail in their ballots while Republicans limited themselves to Election Day.
Trump lost Pennsylvania by about 80,000 votes in 2020, but he was significantly behind in the mail-in vote, losing that by 1.4 million. This discrepancy likely stemmed from Trump’s public skepticism about mail-in voting prior to the ballots being counted in the Keystone State.
In September 2020, 74% of Republican voters expressed concerns about potential fraud associated with mail-in voting, making them considerably less likely to utilize that method, The Post noted.
