For months leading up to the 2022 midterm election, pundits with crystal balls emphatically declared, “The red wave is coming!” To their credit, a perfect storm was brewing: The party out of power historically performs well during a midterm. President Joe Biden’s approval rating was underwater, and working-class families were suffering from the highest inflation rate in more than 40 years. Nonetheless, Republicans only won a narrow majority in the House and lost a Senate seat in Pennsylvania.
What turned the supposed red tsunami into a scarlet trickle? Simply put, the Republican Party failed to adopt a national early and mail-in voting strategy. If Republicans utilized in-person early voting and mail-in voting in Arizona, as they did in Florida, then Kari Lake would almost certainly be governor today.
Since 2020, election integrity has been a top concern for voters. While the general consensus was that Republicans should vote in person on Election Day, this backfired disastrously in 2022: An hour into the election, an estimated 30 percent of Maricopa County polling locations reported problems with machines. Conservative voters who had waited until the last day to cast their ballots were disenfranchised in the ensuing confusion. Ultimately, Lake lost by a mere 17,000 votes. If Republicans had voted early, then they would not have experienced these problems, would have been able to get more Republicans to the polls, and, most importantly, would have won.
In Nevada, Republican senatorial candidate Adam Laxalt lost by only 8,000 votes. Despite there being 654,145 registered
