Who could have predicted that GOP efforts to demonize early voting would suppress their own vote?

In the annals of colossal screw-ups, the Republican Party’s ridiculous war on early and mail-in voting probably ranks as one of the more consequential. Fed a litany of lies from Donald Trump and others in the GOP essentially demonizing these immensely popular measures, Republican voters were incessantly taught to ignore them and rely instead on in-person, Election Day voting to cast their ballots. Meanwhile, Republican-dominated state legislatures eagerly jumped on the bandwagon, parroting Trump’s lies about early voting and enacting restrictions and limitations on early voting because that meshed nicely with their overall goal of suppressing Democratic voters.

Nonexistent voter fraud quickly became the routine excuse parroted as justification for legislation designed to limit such measures, because it was assumed that Democrats would benefit more from them.

Republicans’ mindless distrust of anything remotely related to COVID-19 safety precautions—such as reliance on mail-in ballots—also helped cement these unfounded suspicions in the minds of their own voters.

Many Republicans now seem to have belatedly realized how dearly they paid for this manufactured Trumpian idiocy, both in 2020 and especially in 2022 as predictions of a “red wave” to offset already cast Democratic votes failed to materialize. Even donors and party leaders still beholden to Trump are now urging a complete about-face on their prior position and are encouraging their voters to vote early and by mail. But as reported by Josh Dawsey and Isaac Arnsdorf writing for The Washington Post as well as Neil Vigdor reporting for the New York Times, convincing Republican voters that they should suddenly disregard years of disinformation about alternatives to in-person voting may prove to be an uphill battle.

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