Article originally appeared here, at cardinalnews.org
There’s a famous military quote, often attributed to Gen. Omar Bradley of World War II fame, that goes like this: “Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics.”
The thought can apply to politics, too, but, ultimately, elections are decided by the logistics on the ground — who is best able to persuade their supporters to go cast a ballot.
That brings us to an interesting experiment being conducted by 11th Congressional District Republicans: to persuade more Republicans to sign up for the state’s Permanent Absentee Ballot list, which means that, in every election, they’ll automatically get mailed a ballot.
This might seem a hard lift, given that Democrats have been much more enthusiastic than Republicans about the various innovations of early voting, with voting by mail being the voting method Republicans have been the most skeptical about. We’ve had three close elections in a row — 2021, 2022, 2023 — but the State Board of Elections reports that mail voting has been overwhelmingly a Democratic preference. Each year the mail vote ran 68.7% to 76.0% Democratic. By contrast, the in-person early voting vote has been more closely divided (although still trending Democratic), while the day-of voting has always produced a Republican majority.
That — along with election security concerns — has led some Republicans to conclude that early voting ought to be done away with altogether. Del. Tim Griffin, R-Bedford County, ran last year on such a platform. He also introduced a bill that would do away with what some call “no excuses” absentee voting and restore the requirement that anyone wishing to vote absentee must declare some reason why they can’t make it to the polls on Election Day.
Now Republicans in Fairfax County have a different idea: They want to increase early voting, at least by Republicans. That doesn’t necessarily mean they still like the idea, but they understand the difficult situation that not participating in early voting puts them in. “[Lt. Gov.] Winsome Earle-Sears says it well — if the other party is voting for 45 days and you’re voting on one day, game over,” says Matt Braynard, who is heading the mail ballot initiative for 11th District Republicans.
The committee’s chairwoman, Rosie Oakley, has a more formal statement: “As a rule, we Republicans don’t like Early Voting or Absentee voting by mail. However, current VA law allows 45 days of early voting, and no reason is required to vote by mail. We won’t be able to change election law until Republicans have control of [the General Assembly], and that can’t happen until 2027 when the VA State Senate runs for reelection. In the meantime, the decision has been made to try and encourage ‘low propensity’ Republican voters to sign up for Permanent Absentee Ballots (PABS). These are voters who would likely vote Republican but don’t vote consistently. Signing up for a Permanent Absentee Ballot would make it convenient for them to vote every year.”
The project the 11th District Republicans are running works like this. They’re sending out 54,000 mailers and 27,000 text messages, targeting those “low-propensity” Republican voters. They’re also tracking which messages and delivery mechanisms work best. Is it one that features a message about election security? Or the one that emphasizes convenience? Or one that includes quotes from multiple Republican leaders? This is a classic marketing field test. The 11th District Republicans have allocated $20,000 to the project and hope to raise another $6,000; if so, they’ll expand the test to various email messages.
They obviously have this fall’s elections in mind, but Braynard points out the long-term benefits: “This project will pay dividends not just in this election year but future years. If someone signs up, they’re very likely to participate in 2025” — when Virginians will elect a governor and the House of Delegates. And while this project is focused just on Fairfax, “what we learn from this can benefit Republicans across Virginia,” Braynard says.
That’s where this experiment in Northern Virginia gets my attention down here on the other end of the state. I’ve written before that Republicans may have more to gain from early voting than Democrats do. These 11th Congressional District Republicans give me an opportunity to walk through the math of how many voters Republicans are leaving uncast, not just in Northern Virginia but also in rural Virginia.
We often think of Northern Virginia as “blazing blue territory,” as state Republican Party chair Rich Anderson calls it. Percentage-wise, it certainly is. However, by sheer size, even a small percentage translates into a lot of votes. That’s why the 11th District Republican initiative is potentially so important — to both parties. Beware, math ahead!
The 11th District Republicans are targeting more casual Republican voters — those low- propensity voters. Even in the heightened partisan environment of a presidential year, there are still lots of people who are registered to vote but don’t. In the 2020 presidential election, 75.08% of the state’s registered voters cast ballots. That was a record for the post-Motor Voter Law era (which boosted registration but also added more low-propensity voters to the rolls). Still, that means 1 out of 4 registered voters didn’t vote. It’s hard for me to imagine a registered voter not casting a ballot in a presidential year, but there are obviously a lot of those people. The 11th District Republicans would like to find the Republican-leaning ones. Maybe that’s possible, maybe it’s not. We’ll see.
However, here’s where their project will really make a difference, if it works: in next year’s governor’s race, when turnout is always lower than in a presidential year (in 2021, it was 54.9% and that’s the only time in the post-Motor Voter Law era that it’s topped 50%). That means there are always a lot of low-propensity voters who sit out a governor’s race, but who might be motivated by the right message or the right candidate. The 11th District Republicans obviously hope it’s theirs.
Let’s review how Republican Glenn Youngkin won the 2021 governor’s race even though Democrat Joe Biden had carried Virginia in 2020: Youngkin did a better job retaining Trump voters in 2021 than Terry McAuliffe did in retaining Biden voters. McAuliffe retained just 66.27% of Biden voters while Youngkin managed to hold onto 84.75% of Trump voters. Youngkin won because he did a better job of motivating low-propensity Republican voters than McAuliffe did at motivating low-propensity Democratic voters. We saw this in the form of big surges in gubernatorial-year turnout in Republican-voting counties while Democratic turnout sometimes didn’t budge at all.
Even then, he only barely won. Put another way, even though Democrats were pretty average, and Republicans were wildly enthusiastic, the Democrat still almost won.
If you’re a Democrat looking ahead to next year, you’re likely thinking: OK, we can do better than that, and it’s highly unlikely that Republicans will overperform like that again, so we got this, right?
If you’re a Republican, you ought to be thinking: What if Democrats up their game? Can we really match those record gubernatorial year turnout figures again? What if Youngkin was a unique candidate, running in a unique political environment? That line of thinking leads to this: For Republicans to win in 2025, they need to once again do a better job of motivating low-propensity voters.
Where are those voters? Let’s take a look.
Where Democratic vote declined the most 2020-2021
The Republican map looks similar to the Democrats’ but with some important differences. The biggest number of Republican presidential votes that went uncast in the governor’s race was actually in Virginia Beach (a drop-off of 18,114), with Prince William County (16,564) and Fairfax County (16,291) next. This is why the Republican mail-in project in the 11th Congressional District is important: There are simply a lot of Republican votes in Fairfax County, even if they are a relatively small percentage. But let’s keep drilling into the data.
Percentage of Biden 2020 vote that McAuliffe retained in 2021
This chart shows the Democratic vote from 2020 to 2021 on a percentage basis — the darker the area, the better job Democrats did at retaining their presidential vote. You’ll see they did the best job in Rappahannock, Nelson and Highland counties, but saw their biggest drop-offs in parts of Southwest and Southside. The number of votes is relatively small there, but they do add up. A stronger effort there would have helped Democrats offset the drop-off in Northern Virginia.
Now, let’s turn to the Republicans.
Where Republican vote dropped the most 2020-2021
The Republican map looks similar to the Democrats’ but with some important differences. The biggest number of Republican presidential votes that went uncast in the governor’s race was actually in Virginia Beach (a drop-off of 18,114), with Prince William County (16,564) and Fairfax County (16,291) next. This is why the Republican mail-in project in the 11th Congressional District is important: There are simply a lot of Republican votes in Fairfax County, even if they are a relatively small percentage. But let’s keep drilling into the data.
Percentage of Trump vote in 2020 that Youngkin retained in 2021
This chart shows what percentage of the Republican presidential vote from 2020 was retained in 2021. The darker the locality, the higher the retention rate. Republicans did a pretty incredible job of retaining their presidential vote in the urban crescent. In Arlington and Alexandria, their retention rate topped 96%. Ditto Goochland County.
To win in 2025, Republicans will need to do that all over again — and pushing the convenience of early voting, especially mail voting, is one way to do that.
Take a look, though, at where the Republican retention rate was the lowest: Southwest Virginia. The county where Republicans were the weakest at retaining their presidential vote was Buchanan County, where they retained just 61.16%. What strikes me is that some of those counties in Southwest Virginia saw the state’s largest upticks in gubernatorial turnout — in Buchanan County, turnout jumped from 30% in 2017 to 40% in 2021. Even so, Republicans still did a relatively poor job of retaining their presidential vote in Buchanan County.
Let’s pause here to restate some things for emphasis: Republicans in 2021 cranked up rural turnout by margins no one expected and that was a big reason Youngkin won. Despite that, though, rural turnout was still much lower than the rest of the state. In some ways, Youngkin lucked out that Democrats were so ho-hum about their nominee. With a stronger Democratic turnout, McAuliffe would have won — despite these record turnout surges in rural Virginia for Youngkin.
If I were a Republican strategist — which I’m assuredly not, I’m just a data nerd — I’d look at all these figures and come to this conclusion: Republicans need to duplicate those big retention rates in the urban crescent, but they also need to improve retention rates in rural Virginia, especially Southwest Virginia. The easiest way to improve those retention rates (and therefore boost gubernatorial year turnout in Republican areas) is to push early voting, with mail voting being the easiest way of all.
A few more numbers. Dickenson County and Falls Church are about the same size, population-wise. They also vote about the same way, just in different directions. Dickenson County in 2021 voted 80.3% Republican; Falls Church voted 76.7% Democratic.
However, look at how different the actual vote tallies are: Dickenson produced 3,867 votes for Youngkin, while Falls Church produced 5,388 votes for McAuliffe. Why the difference? Because in Dickenson County, only 47% of voters went to the polls (and that was up from just 34% in 2017). Meanwhile, in Falls Church, 64% of voters went to the polls (up from 61% in the prior governor’s race).
Republicans ought to be going into Dickenson County and telling people that they’re getting their butts kicked by Northern Virginia liberals. Dickenson County Republicans are essentially surrendering a 1,521-vote margin to a Democratic locality of the same size. If Republicans could persuade Dickenson County Republicans to embrace early voting, be it mail voting or in-person early voting, they could fight Falls Church to a draw and make things a little easier for their party’s nominee for governor.
Now, I’m not going to pretend that boosting the turnout in Republican-voting Southwest localities (or Republican-voting rural localities generally) is enough to win the governor’s race, particularly if likely Democratic nominee Abigail Spanberger excites her party’s voters more than McAuliffe did. However, my point is that Republicans are leaving votes uncast and, mathematically speaking, their low-propensity voters are often in the counties that deliver the highest percentages for Republicans. This is called the low-hanging fruit. In “blazing blue” Northern Virginia, Republicans have to identify their potential supporters before they can blast them with reminders to sign up for the permanent absentee ballot list. In much of Southwest Virginia, Republicans don’t have to worry so much about targeting — not in counties that are voting 80% or more Republican. They can just make a general appeal and, if it works, they’ll expand their majorities.
This is why Republicans have more to gain from early voting than Democrats do. Republicans in 2021 were in an odd position, statistically: Both the three localities with the highest turnout (Goochland County at 71%, Powhatan County at 70%, Highland County at 69%) and two of the three with the lowest turnout (Buchanan County at 40%, Hopewell at 41%) voted Republican. To win, both parties need to raise turnout in the low-voting localities that tilt their way. The difference is that Democrats have already pushed early voting hard; Republicans have not — which tells me Republicans have more unrealized opportunities. That’s why both parties should be interested in this market test by 11th District Republicans; if they’re successful in persuading more low-propensity Republican voters to cast ballots, then the playing field in next year’s governor’s race tilts to the right. Will that be enough to make the difference? We don’t know yet. We just know that historically a lot of Republican voters in rural areas haven’t made it to the polls. Democrats, in passing the early voting laws, may have created a way for Republicans to get those voters to the polls.