Republicans Sound Alarms About Collapse in Rural Turnout but Try To Temper Panic in Final Week of Early Voting

Republican politicians are sounding alarms over the lack of early turnout in heavily GOP rural areas where voters are disproportionately hurt by high gas prices. With no signs of an investment in a robust get-out-the-vote operation for Election Day, poll watchers are warning that Republicans may be heading to a historic loss.Early vote turnout is hardly predictive of the final results, given Democrats have often beaten out Republicans in early and mail-in voting only to fall short after loyal GOP voters turn up on the designated Tuesday in November. This year, however, the chasm between the parties in terms of early turnout is especially stark. Nearly 29 million votes have been cast nationwide as of Monday morning, with turnout increasing by double-digit percentages compared to 2022 in critical states like Maine, Texas, Georgia, Iowa, and North Carolina. Early in-person and mail voting turnout is already north of 60 percent of the 2022 early turnout with nine days to go until the election. Governor Greg Abbott of Texas, who is in a heated race for re-election against state Representative Gina Hinojosa, a Democrat, issued a warning about GOP early turnout on Sunday. “Some people feel that it’s just gonna be automatic, that Republicans are going to win,” he said during an appearance on “Fox News Sunday.” “We saw high voter turnout among Democrats the first couple of days of early voting.” According to data from the Georgia secretary of state’s office analyzed by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, red areas are also not turning out at the same rate that blue areas are. That data showed red counties carried by Mr. Trump have seen no real increase in turnout compared to the last midterm elections in 2022, while counties won by Ms. Harris are seeing an average increase in turnout of about nine percent.“I am concerned that rural Georgia still thinks we’re red, and therefore they look at somebody like myself and my opponent and just say, ‘Well, there’s no comparison,’” the GOP nominee for Georgia governor, Rick Jackson, told reporters at a campaign stop last week. In Michigan, blue counties are far outpacing red counties in terms of early voting. As of Sunday, counties won by Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 on average reached 66 percent of their early votes compared to the first day of early voting in 2024. In red counties carried by Mr. Trump, early turnout hit just 45 percent of where it was on day one in 2024. A popular conservative X user, Jennica Pounds, who goes by the handle DataRepublican, says she has seen early voting data that is so bad for the GOP that she will not share it for fear of harming her party’s “morale.”“The dilemma I have is that my platform is big enough such that being too blunt can have an effect on morale,” Ms. Pounds wrote Sunday. “You MUST turn out and bring their friends, and brace yourself on election night. Even [Texas] is going to be a fight.”Data journalist and the former editorial director for data analytics at FiveThirtyEight, G. Elliott Morris, says the lack of GOP turnout will require a significant get-out-the-vote campaign for Election Day next week, though Mr. Morris sees no evidence of such an operation in the works. “We don’t know if the early vote will be predictive [because] all [Republicans] could just be waiting to vote until Elec Day. What this means in practice is that to win, the GOP will have to have the most successful [Election Day] mobilization operation in modern history — and that it’s completely stealth,” Mr. Morris wrote on X on Sunday. Despite the full-throated warnings from pollwatchers, a former Texas Democratic operative, Evan Barker, argues that the Democratic candidate for Senate, state lawmaker James Talarico, still has the potential to lose because Democrats have been unable to connect with rural communities in recent decades. “I think that Democrats tend to — especially in Texas — think that the answer is only in the suburbs or in the cities and that they just simply need to drive up turnout there,” Ms. Barker said during an appearance on journalist Mark Halperin’s show over the weekend, saying that Mr. Talarico has not done enough to reach out to rural Texas. “I’ve been looking at their ad spends and what they’ve been doing there and I just don’t see that that’s happening. I don’t think that there’s been enough outreach.”To give a sense of the challenge that Republicans face in Texas, for instance, of its 254 counties, 219 are rural with populations under 50,000. They accounted for almost 24 percent of the vote in the 2022 gubernatorial election year. During that year, Mr. Abbott took 53.8 percent of the 8.1 million votes cast and gained 3.3 percentage points over his opponent, Beto O’Rourke, on Election Day. In the early voting period, though, Mr. Abbott collected more than 471,000 votes over his opponent, and received more than 66 percent of the total votes cast for him during the election cycle. He beat Mr. O’Rourke by 883,000 votes but Mr. Abbott underperformed — or lost by more than the margin of victory — in 19 states, 12 of which had populations over 50,000. By comparison, according to data from the Texas secretary of state’s office, the total number of votes Republicans such as the Senate nominee, Ken Paxton, will need is dependent on more moderate Republicans coming home, especially those who cast ballots for Senator John Cornyn in the GOP primary whom Mr. Paxton defeated. If a significant number of Mr. Cornyn’s supporters defect to Mr. Talarico or stay home, then Mr. Paxton will need hundreds of thousands of additional voters out of deep-red rural Texas — voters who have so far not shown up at the polls. According to VoteHub’s model of the current Texas electorate — which is based on factors such as race, residence, age, and income because the state does not release information about party registration for early and mail voters — Mr. James Talarico is favored to win by just under two points. That model is being driven by exceptionally high Democratic turnout in deep-blue areas, including urban centers like Houston, Dallas, and Austin. Mr. Talarico’s strength is also being aided by high Democratic turnout in purple areas of the state like south Texas and the Rio Grande Valley, where Latino voters dominate the electorate. He is currently favored to flip multiple heavily Latino districts that voted for President Trump in 2024, according to the VoteHub model. Mr. Abbott predicted that Republicans, including some who may be considering voting for Democrats this year, will come home in the final week once they see more about the “crazy ideas” Democrats support. He said his political operation is still “working on” GOP turnout. The lieutenant governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, said in an interview with CBS News on Sunday that around 600,000 Texas Republicans who should be showing up to the polls have not yet done so, though he expressed some optimism that the gap will close this week. “One of my messages to the Republicans is you need to get off the bench and get out and vote. We’ll probably catch up and pass the Democrats sometime early next week, midweek. We should have a pretty healthy lead when we go into the end of early voting,” Mr. Patrick said.

Republicans Sound Alarms About Collapse in Rural Turnout but Try To Temper Panic in Final Week of Early Voting

Republicans Sound Alarms About Collapse in Rural Turnout but Try To Temper Panic in Final Week of Early Voting

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