Salena Zito
Washington Examiner, Nov. 11, 2022
“Currently, Democrats are miles ahead of Republicans at targeting specific races and voters. Through mail balloting, they put those voters in the bank early.”
The first thing Allegheny County Republican Chairman Sam DeMarco saw on election night after the polls closed was the more than 100,000 votes from his home county that dropped for Democrat John Fetterman through mail-in ballots. Although he wasn’t sure just yet that that meant the race was lost, he also knew Republicans needed to fix something in the party’s way of doing things going forward.
“Those initial large dump of voters were mail-in ballots from Democrats,” he said of the advance voting that began in 2020 during the pandemic. Democrats embraced it with gusto, but Republicans shied away.
“The biggest takeaway from Tuesday night is that Republican attitudes in regard to mail-in voting needs to change,” he continued. “Right now, it’s like we’re running a 100-yard race against the Democrats and giving them a 45-yard head start. Both parties have limited resources, but while they work during the 50 days of early voting collecting and banking early votes … we’re just collecting promises to show up on Election Day; it’s not sustainable, and Democrats get better at it every cycle.”
When all the dust is settled, it will be interesting to see what the percentage of mail-in votes for Democrats was in the final count; anything over 40% is a real problem for Republicans going forward if they don’t right their mail-in ballot ship.
Before the pandemic, Pennsylvania voters needed a valid excuse to cast an absentee ballot. Act 77, which was signed on Oct. 31, 2019, and went into effect on Jan. 1, 2020, added no-excuse mail-in voting up to 50 days before an election. … To read the full article, click here]
