Two Lehigh Valley Republicans, former political rivals, are joining forces to get out the GOP mail-in vote [The Morning Call]

Lisa Scheller, in her bid to represent the Lehigh Valley in Congress last year, lost to incumbent Susan Wild by around 5,000 votes, or a roughly 1.6% margin.

What does she think was a deciding factor in her loss? Mail-in votes.

Pennsylvania Republicans have consistently trailed in mail-in voting numbers since the Commonwealth passed a law allowing no-excuse voting by mail in 2019.

That’s why Scheller and Dean Browning, another unsuccessful GOP candidate for office in 2022, are launching the Win Again PAC to try to sell Pennsylvania GOPers on voting by mail.

Despite bipartisan support for the bill when it passed, many Pennsylvania Republicans have spent the last two years blasting mail-in voting, sowing doubt that mail votes can be trusted and mounting lawsuits to challenge the 2019 law altogether.

Those who attacked mail-in voting were following the lead of former President Donald Trump, who made false claims that mail-in voting was fraudulent to bolster his lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

No evidence exists that mail-in voting has ever led to widespread fraud in Pennsylvania, but that distrust of mail-in voting has had consequences for Republicans: Democrats beat Republicans in mail in votes by a roughly 3:1 margin across Pennsylvania in the 2022 midterms.

Democratic victories in Pennsylvania upset many Republican expectations of a “red wave,” as their candidates won the governorship, Pat Toomey’s U.S. Senate seat and several key congressional seats, as well as enough competitive state house seats to give Democrats a slim majority for the first time since 2010.

Not all election results have been certified for the May 2023 primary elections, but early data shows that Democrats were, again, far more likely to vote by mail than Republicans. For example, in the statewide Supreme Court primary election, around 41% of Democrats who voted chose to do so by mail, compared to just 14.5% of Republicans.

Because of the disparity, Republicans now are beginning to change their tune on mail-in votes, including Trump himself. The former president told attendees at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March that it’s time to “change our thinking” on mail-in voting and that Republicans need to embrace it in order to beat “Democrats at their own game.”

Republicans’ skepticism of mail-in voting puts them at a disadvantage.

Mail-ins can be requested several weeks before an election, giving voters ample time to return their ballot, versus those who wait until Election Day have just the 13-or-so hours that polls are open. Voters who wait until Election Day expose themselves to any number of last minute roadblocks, from long lines to paper ballot shortages.

“We’re giving ourselves one day to vote,” said Arnaud Armstrong, a GOP political strategist who is also behind the PAC. “We’re disproportionately setting ourselves up for failure with anything that can happen on Election Day.”

On the campaign trail in 2022, Scheller and Browning largely avoided weighing in on Trump’s false claims. But now they are making their stance clear — mail-in voting is essential to Republican victory in Pennsylvania.

“Heading into last November it became very clear that republicans had a big problem with mail-in ballots,” Scheller said. “We knew this problem existed and to the extent it existed we ultimately realized it was a game changer.”

The two Lehigh County Republicans have something else in common: They both competed to be the Lehigh Valley’s Republican candidate for Congress in 2020, with Scheller securing the nomination that year.

Despite their history as opponents, Browning said his and Scheller’s “differences have never been on the policy and the principles of the Republican Party.”

“Our focus right now is to win. We believe whole-heartedly in Republican policies and principles,” Browning said. “We want to make a difference, and the way we make a difference is equipping Republicans to win.”

Win Again’s target are low-propensity, or infrequent mail-in voters. Republican mail-in advocates believe that getting these less enthusiastic voters on board with mail in balloting will lead to greater GOP turnout and thus, more Republican wins. Voters who choose to vote by mail can opt to receive an mail ballot application for every election afterward, making it more likely that they will vote by mail again.

But what will it take to sell Republicans on mail-in voting, considering many in their own party claim it cannot be trusted?

Armstrong said that as part of Trumps’ field team in 2020, he and other organizers were trying to push mail-in ballots to voters. He admitted they ran into “conflicting messaging” like fundraising emails from Trump that denigrated mail-in votes, which hurt the GOP overall.

But he said it’s an “encouraging” sign that prominent Republicans, from Trump to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, are beginning to embrace and promote mail-in voting.

“All different wings of the party all over are really starting to agree on this. Not because necessarily we love these laws and we love the idea of universal mail-in balloting, but we understand what a powerful tool it is,” Armstrong said. “This is something we’ve had to learn the hard way, unfortunately, and we’ve gotten a great response so far.”.

Still, it could be a hard sell for Republicans who have heard false claims for years that mail-in voting amounts to fraud and is not a trustworthy way to vote.

“We still have Trump and his supporters talking about a stolen election so that’s one of the big obstacles [for Republicans],” said John Kincaid, a professor of political science at Lafayette College. “The data shows that mail-in voting was quite confident and not corrupt, but that’s a hard sell for people who believe otherwise. But again, I think that it’s a mistake on the part of Republicans.”

It remains to be seen whether this Republican push will bear fruit in 2023 and beyond. Armstrong said launching Win Again will be a “gradual build-up.” The PAC will eventually start running ads and sending mailers, but for now is working on drumming up grassroots support for their case.

As a Pennsylvania-based political action committee, Win Again has not yet filed a financial disclosure, so no information about their donors is yet available. Their first financial disclosure is due in January 2024.

Reporter Lindsay Weber can be reached at Liweber@mcall.com.

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