State Republicans focused on early voting

The head of Delaware’s GOP says early voting with a focus on certain legislative races is the strategy for the party as it heads into the 2024 election season.

“As the chief, I’m going to be pushing for early voting,” said Julianne Murray, chair of the Delaware Republican Party, during a town hall held Sept. 26 at Mulligan’s Pointe in Georgetown.

As the Republican candidate in the 2022 attorney general race, Murray said she lost the race through the ballots cast in early voting. She lost to Attorney General Kathy Jennings by 2,100 machine votes, but Jennings cleared about 12,000 more in early voting, and got another 10,000 more through the no-excuse absentee voting allowed in 2022 – a voting option no longer allowed in 2024.

After successfully arguing against Delaware’s vote-by-mail process, Murray helped end the no-excuse process, which the Delaware Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional. Absentee voting, which requires specific reasons, is still allowed, but voting by mail will not be an option for everyone in 2024.

“If we can’t beat them, we need to join them,” Murray said about getting out the early vote, an effort also known as bank the vote.

Delaware’s voting system can track who has already voted, so, she said, party workers can target those who have not yet voted. This way, she said, funds can be better used to get voters to the polls.

Another focus in 2024, Murray said, needs to be on state legislative races.

“We are two seats away from the Democrats having a super majority in both of our houses, which is a huge, bad thing,” she said. “They’re going to rewrite the constitution as we know it.”

A bottom-up strategy will get people to the polls if they like whoever the candidate is, she said. Issues such as the economy, the cost to feed a family, and high gas and energy costs affect everyone and can help voters feel invested in their future, Murray said.

“They need to know that their vote matters,” Murray said.

The red wave predicted in 2022 never happened, she said, because people became complacent and didn’t think they needed to vote. There’s also a generation of people who believe their vote doesn’t matter, and the party needs to change that mindset, she said.

But, Murray added, the party does not intend to put a candidate in every single legislative race.

“We’re going to be very strategic about where we spend our resources,” she said. 

Unifying the party is doable, Murray said, but they need to find issues everyone can agree on.

“We need to get to the page where the three or four things that matter most to us as Republicans are what we need to be talking about, and all the rest of it is noise,” she said.