How N.C. Republicans Learned to Stop Worrying and Start Loving Early Voting

This story is published in partnership with CityView.

In July 1999, the Democratic majority in the North Carolina General Assembly passed the law that created early voting in this state, and the Republican minority howled.

The GOP declared it “a blueprint for fraud,” longtime politics reporter Rob Christensen reported in the Raleigh News & Observer. “This is the worst bill I’ve ever seen,” one Republican lawmaker told Christensen.

The Republican outrage simmered for a year. Then it re-erupted the following July, on the last day of the lawmaking session, with a raucous protest on the House floor that ended up involving law enforcement when the House speaker grew concerned it might come to fisticuffs.

Democrats wanted to tweak the early voting law to allow the State Board of Elections, then under a Democratic majority, to make final decisions on early voting sites. About 30 Republican lawmakers weren’t having it, waving signs that said “SHAME” as they yelled at the House speaker.

Republican Rep. Larry Justus of Henderson County asserted polling places would be set up in nursing homes for comatose residents to vote straight-ticket for Democrats, The Winston-Salem Journal reported.

“It is almost like someone is worried that you can’t win an election on its own merits, that you have to change a law so you can steal an election,” said then House Minority Leader Richard Morgan of Moore County.

More than two decades later, Republicans became the state’s No. 1 early voting bloc.

In this year’s 17-day early voting period, more than 1.42 million North Carolina GOP voters participated, their all-time record high. They used early voting to help Donald Trump score a solid victory in this state.

It also was the first time that more Republicans cast ballots via in-person early voting in North Carolina than Democrats, who after leading among early voters in past elections came in third place, behind independent voters. This is according to data from the Carolina Elections Vote Tracker, which the right-leaning, Raleigh-based John Locke Foundation runs using State Board of Elections data.

When in-person early voting ended on November 2:

• More than 4.2 million people had voted early in person, a record, the State Board of Elections said.
• More than 1.42 million Republicans voted early, the Vote Tracker said.
• Nearly 1.41 million independent voters early. As the largest voting bloc in the state, unaffiliated voters generally determine the outcome of statewide elections.
• More than 1.36 million Democrats voted early.

In 2020 and 2016, Democrats led the early voting turnout, followed by Republicans and then unaffiliated voters, the Vote Tracker says.

“In the past, I never thought it was that big of an issue. But because of how crucial and important this election was—and Trump and the Republicans were all recommending that we vote early, get our vote in—I chose to do that,” said Don Melvin, 69, a Bladen County resident who voted early for the first time this year. 

One reason that convinced him and fellow Republicans, he said, was “in case something happened to them and they weren’t able to go” on Election Day.

Long Suspicious of Early Voting

The early voting law the Democrats passed in 1999 over the Republicans’ objections said voters would no longer have to provide an excuse—such as illness, infirmity, or travel plans—to vote early. The law also said county elections boards could set up early voting sites at locations around their communities, so people wouldn’t have to travel to the county elections office to cast their early ballot.

Republican animosity toward the early voting law continued for years.

In October 2008, Cumberland County Republican Party Chair Ralph Reagan told The Fayetteville Observer that early voting puts too much of a burden on election officials and allows uninformed citizens to vote.

“It’s just wrong,” he said.

That month, Republican voters in downtown Fayetteville jeered and protested outside an early voting site where people were in line and casting ballots on a Sunday afternoon, The Fayetteville Observer and The Washington Times reported. Republicans were upset because the bipartisan Cumberland County Board of Elections had voted unanimously a few days prior to expand the number of early voting sites from three locations to five. (The board expected a surge of voters due to a planned Obama rally that Sunday.)

When Republicans took control of the legislature in the 2010s, they tried to curtail early voting. They passed legislation in 2013 to shorten the early voting period from 17 days to 10, eliminate same-day voter registration, and limit Sunday voting hours to one Sunday instead of two Sundays.

Lawsuits commenced. The changes were eventually struck down because evidence emerged that the restrictions intentionally targeted Black voters and were unconstitutional. The Republicans had focused on Black voters because most Black voters are registered Democrats.

In early 2016, when Republicans had majority control of the state and local elections boards, The News & Observer reported that state GOP leaders urged Republican board members to curtail the hours and locations for early voting “in the best interest of the party.”

Then in fall 2016, Trump won North Carolina, and the presidency, with the help of almost 1.38 million people who visited early voting sites to cast their ballots for him.

Trump’s support among voters using the Democrats’ 1999 early voting law grew to almost 1.9 million in 2020—beating Democrat Joe Biden in early voting by more than 205,000. That year, Republican activists and the reelection campaign of Republican U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis sought people who had been infrequent voters and brought them to early voting—when same-day voter registration is allowed—the USA Today Network reported.

This year, Trump’s early in-person vote turnout increased to nearly 2.14 million. That was almost 116,000 more early in-person votes than Kamala Harris received.

In Mecklenburg County, “The local Republican Party has been pushing early vote for their constituents,” Democratic County Commissioner Laura Meier said as she campaigned at an early voting site in Charlotte on November 2. “And it’s obvious—like they’re really coming out.”

Not that every Republican voter is convinced.

“It’s Election Day, not Election Month,” one Republican volunteer said she heard from some of the voters she tried to persuade to vote early.

Democratic political consultant Thomas Mills thinks the Republicans once feared convenient early voting options would boost Democratic turnout. The Republican coalition 25 years ago was a combination of upper middle class and wealthy people with banking and business interests, he said, plus evangelical Christians. Rural working class communities were more Democratic, Mills told The Assembly, and mill and factory workers benefited from easier access to voting, he said.

Now, the makeup of the parties has changed dramatically, Mills said, with the GOP attracting more working-class voters for whom early voting is helpful.

Republicans used to lead in voting by mail-in absentee ballots, said political scientist Michael Bitzer of Catawba College, accounting for 54 percent of mail-in ballots in North Carolina in 2008. They still led mail-in balloting in 2016.

But Democrats were the most prevalent group to vote by mail in 2020, amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Trump and GOP voters frequently criticized mail-in balloting that year as a vector of corruption. Registered Republicans voting by mail dropped to 21 percent. It dropped to 19 percent in 2022.

“So they were basically following the leader,” Bitzer said. 

The leader changed his mind this year. Trump’s supporters listened and spread the word.

How to get Republicans to ‘Bank Your Vote’

In 2023, the Republican National Committee and rightwing advocacy organizations such as American Majority Action began working to get Trump voters comfortable with and even excited about voting early, whether it was by mail or in person.

Dallas Woodhouse, the North Carolina executive director for American Majority, visited 70 of North Carolina’s 100 counties for training sessions in the last year to persuade Trump supporters to vote as early as they can. Ideally, this voting would be by mail, he told The Assembly.

He said a field team of 150 people knocked on 250,000 doors and engaged with voters via 2 million phone calls and text messages.

At a Trump rally in Wilmington on September 21, Trump’s podium was near a sign that said “Make a plan to vote!” and noted “mail / absentee / early in-person” options. The GOP’s “make a plan” phrase echoed a similar “voting plan” campaign the Democrats waged in 2020 to get their supporters to cast their ballots as early as possible.

“You can go out and vote right now,” Trump told the Wilmington crowd.

The GOP efforts included the RNC’s Bank Your Vote operation which promised it was  “leveraging the full infrastructure of the RNC, the North Carolina Republican Party, and our historic investments in our data driven ground game to encourage, educate, and activate Republican voters on when, where, and how to lock in their votes as early as possible.”

Trump promoted his Swamp the Vote website, which advised voters on voter registration, polling locations and how to return their ballots.

In Cornelius on November 2, Republican Karen Snyder of Cabarrus County said her husband talked her into standing in line on the last Saturday of early voting on November 2 to cast her ballot for Trump.

It was “kind of like traditional” to vote on Election Day, she said, “but a lot of things sunk in … I think we got scammed four years ago by the Democrats rigging every damn thing. So we just had to get in early. And hopefully they won’t rig that.”

With her day job, Snyder said it’s also far more convenient to vote early, so she expects she will vote early again from now on.

So does Republican first-time early voter Sal Recco of Cabarrus County, who volunteered at a Charlotte early voting site on November 2. He said he never had anything against early voting, but now he favors it. “I just didn’t realize how easy it was,” he said.

“My folks were strict Republicans. And they voted on Election Day. It was like a religion for them,” said Karen Snyder’s husband, 77-year-old Tom. He always stuck to Election Day, too, he said, but he felt moved by the attempted assassination of Trump near Butler, Pennsylvania. “When he got in the ear, and I’m going, ‘You know, they’re gonna try and get rid of this guy.’”

Early Voting Saves Candidates’ Money

Woodhouse said he has to punch through myths with some Republican voters when it comes to early voting, like the idea that it gives Democrats time to manufacture fake ballots or otherwise commit fraud.

“You just work them through—‘That’s not how it works, that’s not what they do,’” he said.

Woodhouse appeals to the GOP’s pragmatic side. “Republicans are money people,” he said. For example, he tells GOP voters how much it costs to send campaign mailers to their homes, to get volunteers or paid staff to call them to encourage them to vote, to get volunteers or paid staff to knock on their doors, and so on.

“All campaigns work the same,” Woodhouse said. “They work from strength to weakness. You try to turn out your good Republicans before you get to the weak ones.”

Whether or not someone has voted yet is public record, and political parties, candidate campaigns, and other activist organizations can use early voting records to direct their efforts at those who have not yet voted, Woodhouse said.

He gave an example: It may cost $5 to reach a reliable voter who casts their ballot by mail in the first few weeks. It could be more like $20 if they vote on the first day of early in-person voting. But if they wait until Election Day? The party could spend as much as $100 on outreach, Woodhouse said.

While Woodhouse thinks the effort to get voters to vote early helped boost overall turnout for Republicans this year, he was reluctant to call it an embrace.

“I think the accurate thing to say is that we participate,” he said “We don’t have to love it.”

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