Republicans' 2022 lesson: Voters who trust elections are more likely to vote

PHOENIX — It was early on Election Day when polling places in Maricopa County started experiencing a glitch. Tabulation machines were rejecting thousands of ballots, a result of a printer error, and the confusion was causing lines and frustration at the polls.

There was a simple fix: Voters could place their ballots in a secure box — called Box 3 — kept at every polling station for just such situations. Their votes would be counted later at the county's central tabulation center.

But for the state's most conservative voters, a group primed by two years of former President Donald Trump's stolen-election lies to see conspiracy in every step of the voting process, Box 3 smelled of trouble. Election deniers in the state's Republican Party soon began warning voters away from the boxes as suspicions flew across Twitter and right-wing media. "Do not trust them," Charlie Kirk, the conservative leader, warned his followers.

That message reinforced Republicans' skepticism about elections, but it didn't do much to help their candidates win. Later that morning, the Republican candidate for governor, Kari Lake, held a news conference to deliver the opposite message. Box 3 was safe, her campaign lawyer said.

"Vote, vote, vote,'' Lake added. "We've got to vote today."

Whether the suspicion and mixed messages around Box 3 made a difference in a race that Lake lost by a hair to her Democratic opponent, Katie Hobbs, might never be known. (Her campaign maintains the fault lies with the county.)

But the moment crystallized one of the main lessons of the 2022 midterms: Casting doubt on the legitimacy of elections might be an effective tool for galvanizing true believers to participate in a primary — or, at its origins, to storm the U.S. Capitol in order to overturn a losing result. But it can be a lousy strategy when it comes to the paramount mission of any political campaign: to get the most votes.

Postelection data may help show just how much the intense rhetoric about a rigged system affected Republican turnout, which, according to party officials, was relatively robust but did not meet expectations. And elections are ultimately decided by myriad factors.

But there were prima facie examples across the country of where denialism led candidates to eschew tried-and-true methods of modern vote gathering, most likely costing them votes.

"They were torquing the entire system in a way that disadvantaged their own candidates," said Adrian Fontes, a Democrat who handily defeated one of the most strident election deniers in the country, state Rep. Mark Finchem, to become Arizona's next secretary of state.

That was especially true here in Arizona, where Lake emerged as the breakout figure of her Trump-endorsed class. Fresh out of the anchor's chair at the local Fox station that had been her perch for more than 20 years, she delivered Trump's hollow message about fraud and malfeasance in 2020 with a telegenic polish that her fellow classmates lacked.

"We had a fraudulent election," Lake maintained on Fox during her primary campaign. "We have an illegitimate president sitting in the White House." Endorsing a gamut of disproved and unsubstantiated conspiracies, she questioned the security of voting machines and impugned mail voting, saying, "We want Election Day, not election month."

That, in effect, meant forgoing the organizational advantages that modern campaigns have developed through a full embrace of mail voting — which campaigns can easily track, allowing them to bank votes before Election Day and then focus their resources on turning out those who have yet to send ballots. Republicans in Arizona have traditionally been quite good at it.

"We would have never, ever thought about telling people to hold onto their ballots," said Wes Gullett, a Republican strategist who long served as a senior strategist for Sen. John McCain of Arizona. (Gullett's firm, OH Strategic Communications, worked for Fontes.) "The only reason to do that is to build this narrative about 'foul play' and keep that narrative going, but anytime you encourage people not to vote immediately, you lose the opportunity to get that vote in the bank."

Lake's campaign was not unique. Many Republicans disparaged mail voting, following the example Trump set in 2020 when it became clear that Democrats were more likely than Republicans to use the method (though Trump himself votes by mail).

The risks of the approach became increasingly apparent in the last week of the campaign.

In Nevada, for instance, Adam Laxalt suggested during his Republican primary race for Senate that voting by mail and using drop boxes were "not safe methods."

Although full results are not yet available (absentee ballots are accepted until Saturday), it appears that some voters followed Laxalt's initial guidance. The share of voters who cast ballots on Election Day in Nevada was 21% in 2022 compared with 11% in 2020, according to data from the secretary of state's office.

In Michigan, where Republicans narrowly lost the state's House of Representatives by roughly 700 votes across a couple of districts, some state legislators laid blame on Kristina Karamo, the Republican candidate for secretary of state, who repeatedly cast skepticism on voting by mail and even sued to block mail ballots from Detroit in the waning weeks of the campaign.

Republicans might have learned lessons from Glenn Youngkin's successful campaign for governor in Virginia last year. Youngkin, a conservative running in a lightly blue state, embraced voting by mail and voting early.

His campaign sent canvassers to voters' doors, asking if they had requested or sent in their mail ballots. He held events at early-voting locations, encouraging everyone to cast a ballot early if possible. (It's a tradition he carried into the governor's office, and he voted early in November, too.)

"I think when the autopsies are written about 2022, the early vote and the absentee vote are going to be a huge part of it and something that our party really needs to embrace early on," said Kristin Davison, a political adviser to Youngkin.

Where Lake was trying to move her voters en masse in one big Election Day push, the campaign of her opponent, Hobbs, relied heavily on mail voting and was quietly working to send supporters to the polls in a targeted fashion.

"Every few days or so, we get the list of voters who turned in their ballot; we can remove them from our universe so we are only talking to voters who haven't voted yet," said Nicole DeMont, Hobbs' campaign manager. "If they were telling everybody to vote on Election Day, you're never shrinking your universe."

Local Republicans appeared to have second thoughts as the campaign entered its final week, when the chair of the state party, Kelli Ward, a loud proponent of the stolen-election narrative, posted a photo of herself on Twitter placing her ballot in a drop box.

Yet Lake's campaign remained vulnerable to the myriad forces that can come to bear on that single day — when a sick child or the weather or the demands of work may keep people from going to polls or, in the event of lines, keep them from staying long enough vote.

Last Tuesday, lines became longer when a printer problem produced ballots that were difficult for tabulation scanners to read. The issue affected about 30% of the county's polling places.

In some cases, they said, party leaders advised their supporters against using the felt-tipped pens that election officials had provided at ballot stations, leading some voters to use their own ballpoints, which caused trouble for scanners. (Officials said those votes were registered but added to wait times.) Then there were the initial warnings against using Box 3, which, county officials said, also led to longer lines.

"It is clear to me that those lines were longer because members — leaders — in one political party were spreading misinformation," the chair of the Maricopa Board of Supervisors, Bill Gates, said Monday.

As a Hobbs victory was coming into view, though, local Republicans were seizing on the printer problems to argue that their voters — who were always expected to make up a larger share of in-person voters than Democrats — were disenfranchised. Members of both parties said they expected that those complaints could feed lawsuits and boisterous protests like those that took place in 2020 — against a losing result, again, and not a winning one.

Citing no evidence, Lake, in a tweet, declared the result "BS."