Tom Eddy, chair of the Erie County Republican Party, at the party’s offices in Erie, Penn..Adrian Morrow/The Globe and Mail
Tom Eddy is all in on mail-in voting in the coming U.S. elections – if only he can convince the rest of Donald Trump’s party.
As the chair of the local Republicans in Erie County, Pa., Mr. Eddy sees absentee ballots as one of the main reasons the Democrats won the presidency in 2020 and held on to the state’s governorship in 2022. The Republicans, meanwhile, rejected mail-in voting, as Mr. Trump and his acolytes baselessly claimed it was an avenue for election-rigging.
Mr. Eddy’s efforts to reverse the trend have been slow going, he said. When he tries to hand out ballot applications at Republican events, people don’t want to hear him.
“The Democratic Party put all its money and resources into getting people to buy into the mail-in ballot system. The Republican establishment pretty much pushed out this idea that this is all fraud,” he told The Globe and Mail at his party’s headquarters in a suburban strip plaza.
“When I go out and try to push mail-in ballots, they all tell me, ‘Oh that’s just cheating.’”
Another drag on his party’s fortunes, Mr. Eddy said, is the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade, ending a half-century of federal abortion rights protections. The decision, unpopular with voters across the political spectrum, was made by the court’s conservative majority, including three justices appointed by Mr. Trump.
“Would I like to see abortions eliminated? Yeah. But is it practical? No,” said Mr. Eddy, a 74-year-old retired physical education and health teacher. (“They called me ‘Sex Eddy,’” he said with a laugh.)
“Anybody that’s running, I tell them, ‘Just avoid it. Don’t talk about abortion because you can’t win. Even if you’re talking to people that you think are on your side, you may make a statement that could really burn you.’”
Mr. Eddy’s dilemma is emblematic of a difficult dynamic for the Republican campaign this presidential election year, as it looks past its convention in Milwaukee, Wis., last week and works to move votes on the ground. Winning over moderates and motivating less committed voters requires running away from these two issues, both major articles of faith to the party’s base – and central to Mr. Trump’s persona.
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The former president and 2024 Republican presidential nominee himself appears to struggle with them. At times, he brags that he was able to “kill” Roe v. Wade through his Supreme Court appointments. But he ordered the Republican National Convention to adopt a platform that, for the first time in 40 years, does not include a call for a national abortion ban.
And while Mr. Trump and the party continue to push for curbs on mail-in voting, he has also issued calls for his supporters to use it: “Absentee voting, early voting and election day voting are all good options,” he said in one video.
Nowhere has the Republican Party executed a more abrupt about-face than in swing-state Pennsylvania, where presidential elections are often decided by a percentage point or two, and where Mr. Trump survived an assassination attempt during a rally earlier this month. The shift is born of a recognition that the election may ultimately go to whichever party can motivate low-propensity voters on the fence about participating at all.
“We have to embrace enthusiastically and actively the mail-in votes,” said Doug Mastriano, a Republican Pennsylvania state senator who led attempts to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election and lost a 2022 bid for governor. “The answer now is not whining and complaining.”
Ironically, it was a Republican-controlled state legislature that, in 2019, legalized absentee voting with no excuse required. The following year, after Mr. Trump discouraged voters from using the system, the party tried unsuccessfully to repeal the law, have courts strike it down and throw out all of the state’s mail-in ballots.
Charlie Gerow, a long-time Republican strategist in Harrisburg, the state capital, likens the situation now to basketball’s three-point shot.
“You’ve got two choices. One is to say, ‘We don’t like that three-point line and we’re not going to shoot from behind it.’ You’re going to lose a lot of games,” he said.
“The other is, ‘Well, I may not like it, but I’m going to learn how to run every play.’”
So far, however, it’s unclear whether the party can ease many of its supporters away from the outlandish conspiracy theories that have become increasingly prevalent in the era of Mr. Trump.
Standing in the entranceway of his house in the town of Corry, Pa., voter Dean Jukes contends that the Democrats rigged the 2020 election (“they opened up the voting machines and dumped in 30,000 votes”) and destroyed the evidence (“they brought the machines to a warehouse, brought in a guy on a motorcycle with a bomb, and blowed it up.”)
Such views don’t make Mr. Jukes, a 77-year-old retired tool and die maker, an outlier. Polling has consistently shown about two-thirds of Republican voters believe President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory was illegitimate.
The game for Mr. Eddy is reaching less committed voters, such as Jen Clark. The 44-year-old factory worker is inclined toward Mr. Trump, cares mostly about pocketbook issues and has not always made a point of marking a ballot.
Sitting in a Corry park, Ms. Clark said the former president “seemed to be more for the people and creating jobs,” and blamed Mr. Biden for “killing us off really quick” with the inflation of recent years.
She didn’t vote in 2016 but cast a ballot for Mr. Trump in 2020. This time around, whether voters of her ilk can be convinced to participate may determine whether Mr. Trump carries the state – and the country.
“I was never really one to devote much attention to politics,” Ms. Clark said. “And then I realized how much they affected my day-to-day life.”