Wisconsin Republicans once more felled by a common foe: The mail

Republicans lost big in Wisconsin. But their downfall came well before Tuesday.

Liberal Milwaukee County judge Janet Protasiewicz crushed former conservative state Supreme Court Justice Dan Kelly. The race wasn't particularly close. Protasiewicz won by 11 points, or over 200,000 votes.

One reason she won: She had a big head start on votes before polls even opened on Tuesday.

At least 435,000 people voted early, either by mail or in-person. Democratic Party officials estimated ahead of the election that Protasiewicz banked at least a 100,000 vote advantage from that bucket of voters.

“Democrats are playing a totally different game than Republicans are,” said Rebecca Kleefisch, a Republican who has served as Scott Walker’s lieutenant governor and lost a gubernatorial primary last year.

Democrats have embraced a big mail and absentee voting strategy in the past few cycles, but Republicans have been skeptical — in part because of loud criticism of the practice from former President Donald Trump. But it comes at a cost. Republicans are increasingly finding themselves in the hole before Election Day even arrives.

“We need to do what is legal, the same way Democrats are doing what is legal," Kleefisch said. "Republicans sometimes cling to strategies that are not embracing all of the new opportunities that have been afforded.”

The lack of mail strategy creates a huge financial and get-out-the-vote disadvantage for Republicans — and after Tuesday’s blowout, some in the party are renewing calls for that to change.

“You can't be down several hundred thousand votes and think that you're going to make it up in 13 hours on Election Day. I mean, that's just not a math equation that works for our side,” said state Republican Party executive director Mark Jefferson.

Perhaps ironically, Wisconsin is a state where the conservative apparatus has been among the most proactive about trying to get voters to vote early. Jefferson was paraphrasing party chair Brian Schimming, who has been practically begging Republicans to vote early in the run-up to the election.

The more reliable Republicans who vote early, they say, the more it frees the party up to contact lower propensity voters for Election Day.

Jefferson argued that the party made progress this cycle. But, he noted, “I don't think anyone was under the impression that we were going to change the culture on early voting in one election cycle.”

“We've had some struggles on our side in the past because a lot of our folks have a philosophical problem with early voting,” he added.

It isn’t the first time Republicans have grappled with this conundrum: Shortly after Trump’s loss, operatives and media pundits declared that the GOP’s unilateral disarmament with early and mail voting was a mistake.

But, operatives say, that is not something that will simply change over night. It requires a consistent drumbeat from party leaders to get Republican voters to do it.

“I think Chairman Schimming has done a really good job on that, letting people know it's okay,” said Bill McCoshen, a longtime Republican lobbyist and operative in Wisconsin. “There is a method to the madness: We [need to be] banking as many votes early as we can so that we can focus on those traditional voters who haven't voted by Election Day, who become the focus over the final weekend.”

But that only goes so far with Trump. The indicted former president has raged against mail voting for years — falsely saying it is a source of significant fraud that benefits Democrats — and has regularly called for most voting to happen in-person on Election Day.

His campaign has tried to sing a different tune lately, but in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity late last month, Trump said “I never changed anything, what I did is say ‘mail-in ballots are automatically corrupt,’” and that he would want “same day voting ideally.” After some gentle coaching from Hannity, Trump eventually allowed that Republicans “will have no choice” but to accept those voting methods.

That puts Trump at odds with Republicans who believe the party needs to speak with one voice on the issue.

“Some groups have pushed [early voting], Trump even says that in some capacity — some days, other days he doesn't,” said Matt Batzel, the Wisconsin-based national executive director of American Majority Action, a conservative group that had a ballot chase program in Wisconsin for this election. “That just has to change, otherwise we’ll continue to get whooped like last night.”

Batzel noted, however, a general resistance from some voters and party operatives that is tough to overcome. “Culturally, and tactically, we're stuck in the 90s,” he said.

Democrats crowed about their successful program following Protasiewicz’s win on Tuesday, crediting their robust early vote program as one of their keys to success.

“The Democratic early vote machine really started in the spring Supreme Court race of 2020, when Covid hit,” state Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler said. (Kelly was also a candidate in that contest, losing with a similarly lopsided margin.)

That change in 2020 necessitated a whole new approach for how the party reached out to voters, Wikler said. A major investment for the party then was helping would-be early voters navigate the sometimes-complicated ballot request system for the first time. But that pays dividends for the party now, with a sizable number of those voters now sticking with early voting.

“By the time we get to Election Day, we're focused on the people that we know haven't voted yet, which in effect multiplies the size of our volunteer operation,” Wikler said. “Because if you take the same number of volunteers focused on a smaller number of voters, you get more knocks on the doors and more calls to people's phones.”

Some Republicans also believe that they are missing out on independent, persuadable voters. By the time they are contacted by the conservative apparatus, they may have already made plans to cast an early vote for a Democrat.

“There's still a large number of independents that are voting absentee,” Batzel said. “And we don't want to just cede independents to the other side because we're just not having the conversations about voting soon enough.”

And if Republicans don’t eventually embrace it, it will only hurt the party in the long term.

“The message to our voters needs to change,” said Jesse Hunt, a veteran GOP operative who has served in senior roles at the RGA, NRSC and NRCC.

Madison Fernandez contributed to this report.