Will 2024 make Republicans rethink their relationship with voter turnout?

When John Merrill was secretary of state of Alabama, he felt like it was his job as the state's top voting official to encourage voter registration.

"One of the things I was known for as a secretary was trying to get everybody in the state that was eligible," said Merrill, a Republican.

But he remembered that for many in his party, that stance was controversial.

"I had people when I would speak to some Republican groups, they'd tell me, 'I don't like that, I don't think it's a good thing,'" Merrill said. "And I'm like, 'Why would you say that?' And they're like, 'Because you're going to get more Blacks and you're going to get more Democrats.'"

It's not usually said out loud that explicitly. But for decades, the GOP has generally sought limits on voting access. Just this year, Republicans sued numerous times to try to rein in mail voting, and sued the Biden administration over an executive order meant to encourage voter registration.

Such moves — along with restrictive voting legislation — have usually been done in the name of enhancing election security. But politics plays a role, too.

For years, conventional political wisdom has held that higher-turnout elections — as well as policies aimed at increasing voter access — would favor Democrats, and lower-turnout elections — and more restrictive policies — would favor Republicans.

In 2020, then-President Donald Trump even expressed concern that higher levels of voting would mean "you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again."

But this year's election results are a major blow to that theory. Republicans won a trifecta at the federal level in a high-turnout environment.

And now the question is, how will the party respond?

"High turnout doesn't hurt Republicans, and it can in fact help them," said Guy-Uriel Charles, an election law expert at Harvard University. "Now we will see whether the lesson that they learn here is, OK, let's not fight access … or we will see whether we return back to regularly scheduled programming."

A ‘center-right country’?

The estimated turnout rate this year — 63.7 percent of eligible voters — was the second highest since 1960, according to the University of Florida's Election Lab. And Republicans swept the federal government, winning control of the House, the Senate and the presidency.

Trump is on track to become the first Republican in two decades to win the national popular vote.

“It is a center-right country,” said J. Christian Adams, a conservative elections attorney who leads the Public Interest Legal Foundation. “The deeper you drive into the electorate, the more likely Republicans will win. Period.”

For years, Adams has argued with fellow Republicans that higher turnout would actually favor conservatives, and the Republican Party should therefore embrace the idea of encouraging registration and as close to 100 percent turnout as possible.

“If everybody voted and registered to vote, this would be a better country,” Adams told NPR in 2023. “And I will say I think we'd elect more Donald Trumps than we would Barack Obamas.”

But it's less clear whether the rest of the Republican Party will shed its hesitations about access.

Low-propensity voters are crucial to Trump's base

People who vote just in presidential cycles, or every once in a while, are key to electoral trends. They're referred to as low-propensity voters.

Research has found these sorts of voters are generally less educated and make less money, demographic groups that tended to skew Democratic. So as turnout increases, sometimes aided by policies that make voting easier, more low-propensity voters are brought into the fold, which in the past helped Democratic candidates.

But as 2024 showed, those voter trends are not set in stone.

Trump did well with low-propensity voters by a number of measures. For instance, he won people who said it was their first time voting, and people who did not vote in 2020, according to network exit polls.

It's unclear, however, whether Republicans can win low-propensity voters going forward, or if this is a Trump-specific phenomenon.

"Donald Trump was a turnout machine among low-propensity voters," said Charles Stewart, an election expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "What I haven't gone over to is that Republicans in general gain from high-turnout elections."

An ideological conundrum

Stewart has for decades studied partisan opinions about election policy. He says different elements of the Republican Party will parse this year's election results in different ways.

GOP campaign consultants, for instance, may point to Trump's inroads with Black and Hispanic voters as a reason for the party to embrace access. The president-elect's gains among voters of color seemed to come specifically from low-propensity voters (in this case, voters who did not cast ballots in the 2022 midterms), according to a New York Times polling analysis done before the election.

"The Republican Party has shown that it can do well when it appeals to segments of nonwhite voters," Stewart said. "If you're a Republican strategist … it does require you to kind of rethink some of these things."

But Stewart says there's probably a limit to how much the GOP can actually embrace access, due to some in the party having a fundamental aversion to widening the tent.

"There's a wing of the party — the nativist wing, the anti-immigration wing, trending into white nationalism — all of which kind of predisposes that wing to having a hard time imagining that Republican victories can be brought about by mobilizing minority voters," Stewart said. "If you're part of the Republican Party that really is motivated by nativism and nationalism, I think it's going to be harder to make that leap."

Trump himself embodied that dilemma on the campaign trail this year.

Even as his campaign and the Republican National Committee were pushing people to vote early, he was spreading conspiracy theories about widespread noncitizen voting and musing that he wished states would get rid of expanded voting options.

"We have this stupid stuff where you can vote 45 days early," he said at a September rally in Pennsylvania. "I wonder what the hell happens during that 45."

In Alabama, former Secretary Merrill says he could envision a gradual Republican change of heart on certain voting expansions.

His state is one of the last in the country not to offer any forms of early voting, and Merrill said he thinks the GOP-dominated legislature there should consider it.

But when current Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen, also a Republican, was asked recently about early voting, he said he believed in "Election Day — not election month."

Copyright 2024, NPR

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