Youngkin’s Early Vote Gamble Could Have Big 2024 Implications

Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin’s recently unveiled “Secure Your Vote” campaign is the most ambitious early vote operation to date by a statewide Republican officeholder, and will provide crucial data as the GOP looks to boost turnout on a national level through early and mail-in voting next year.

Youngkin’s initiative reflects the evolving approach of the Republican Party toward early voting. In 2020, most Republicans decried new pandemic-inspired laws implementing sweeping changes like no-excuse absentee voting and universal mail-in ballots, raising legitimate concerns about the security of such practices.

But the country soon saw that those “one-time” exceptions actually represented a fundamental shift in the way states conduct elections. If Republicans want to change voting laws and make elections more secure, they will have to do so by taking full advantage of the new early voting procedures – just as Democrats have done from the start.

GOP leaders have since been working to build their own early vote turnout machines, while also pushing for legislative changes to make early voting more secure. Last month, the RNC launched its “Bank Your Vote” campaign to “encourage, educate, and activate Republican voters on when, where, and how to lock in their votes as early as possible, through in-person early voting, absentee voting, and ballot harvesting where legal.”

Youngkin’s Secure Your Vote push, which the governor announced last Tuesday, is loosely modeled on the larger GOP effort, but specifically focused on Virginia’s legislative elections this fall. The initiative’s website, a joint project of Youngkin’s Spirit of Virginia PAC, the Republican Party of Virginia, the Republican State Leadership Committee, the Virginia Senate Republican Caucus, and the Virginia House of Delegates Republican Caucus, provides step-by-step guides for voters to vote by mail or vote early in person.

“We can’t go into our elections down thousands of votes,” Youngkin said in a video posted to Twitter. “You can secure your vote before Election Day… we’ve made it easy to do so.”

Republicans are hopeful that the early vote push will help them take full control of the state government after Virginia seemed to be trending solidly Democrat just a few years ago. Joe Biden won the Old Dominion by 10 points in 2020, but Youngkin’s surprise victory over former Governor Terry McAuliffe in 2021, bringing with it a GOP majority in the House of Delegates, means Republicans are just two state senate seats away from a trifecta in Richmond.

But the optimism following Youngkin’s victory has undoubtedly faded somewhat over the past two years amid other disappointing results. Of the three Virginia U.S. House seats controlled by Democrats that were seen as potential GOP flips in last year’s midterms, Republicans flipped just one, with state senator Jen Kiggans defeating incumbent Elaine Luria. Virginia Republicans also suffered another setback in the special election to fill Kiggans’s vacated senate seat, with Democrat Aaron Rouse narrowly defeating Republican Kevin Adams.

Youngkin and Virginia Republicans are betting big that Secure Your Vote will get things back on track. Just as was the case in 2021, all eyes in the political world will be trained on Virginia this fall as an early indicator of things to come in 2024.

Secure Your Vote will provide the first large-scale, real-world data on how successful GOP early vote operations might be – and perhaps what strategies to avoid. With many Republican voters still understandably skeptical about mail-in ballots and other early voting procedures, Virginia is now a testing ground for whether or not other efforts like Bank Your Vote will be a viable way to boost turnout.

Youngkin’s early vote campaign might also have major implications for his own political future. With Virginia governors limited to one term, speculation about the 56-year-old first-time politician as a potential presidential contender began swirling from the moment he won two years ago.

Although Youngkin has said that he’s not running for president “this year,” some pundits still believe that he could use a favorable outcome in November as a launch pad for a late entry into the race – particularly with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis fading quickly as the leading challenger to former President Donald Trump.

But all of those hypothetical plans are contingent on Secure Your Vote actually producing a positive outcome for the GOP – something which is far from a sure thing.

Since the expansion of early voting in 2020, non-Election Day votes in Virginia have tilted heavily Democrat – a pattern repeated virtually everywhere else in the country. In the Rouse vs. Adams state senate special election, for instance, the Democrat Rouse won 72 percent of all early votes. In 2021, even with Republicans having a good night overall, Virginia Democrats won the early in-person vote 57 percent to 41 percent, and the mail-in vote by a whopping 76 percent to 21 percent.

That’s a massive gap to close through a public messaging campaign with just a few months to go until Election Day. With significant resources being poured into Secure Your Vote (Youngkin’s PAC is reportedly spending seven figures on the effort) that means less money for traditional advertising and voter outreach efforts.

The gamble Youngkin and Virginia Republicans are making is that there are a significant number of voters out there who will vote early for Republican candidates who might otherwise stay home on Election Day. Moreover, they are betting that number is large enough to offset the additional Democrat early votes that this effort is sure to turn out.

If Youngkin is right, Republicans will have a blueprint to match Democrats’ early vote efforts next year – a development that would inspire fear in even the most optimistic Democrat operative.

B.C. Brutus is the pen name of a writer with previous experience in the legislative and executive branches.