Old North News

The head of American Majority Action said North Carolina Republicans are in an “arms race” with Democrats to mobilize to secure votes in the 2024 presidential election.

"We are in an arms race with the left in regards to generating more ballots among mid-to-low propensity voters and partisan voter registration in battleground states like North Carolina," Ned Ryun, founder and CEO of American Majority Action, told Old North News. "It is incumbent upon those who do not consider themselves to be reliable voters to request a ballot, to be on the Permanent Early Voting List and turn themselves into a likely voter.”

The Republican National Committee launched a “Swamp the Vote” campaign that it said is designed “to win by more than the margin of fraud by casting your vote and taking responsibility for ensuring every Republican and Trump voter in your household casts theirs, too.”

Former President Donald Trump promoted the campaign in a Truth Social video, saying, “whether you vote early, absentee, by mail or in person, we must swamp the radical Democrats with massive turnout.”

North Carolina's status as a battleground state comes after Trump won the state over Joe Biden in the 2020 election, despite losing the election as a whole. Trump earned 49.9% of the vote in the state, compared to Biden's 48.6%.

A recent American Greatness poll found Harris up by one point over Trump in battleground states like North Carolina.

The vast majority of North Carolinians voted early in-person in the last presidential election, with 3,460,562 voters, or 62.4% of the final vote population, voting that way. 

Only 16.2% of votes, amounting to 896,818 voters, voted at the polls in person on election day, according to data from the North Carolina Election Assistance Commission. 

Additionally, 974,351 voters, or 17.6% of the total votes, were sent in as mail in ballots. 

Ryun's organization has launched outreach programs to encourage conservative voters to increase voter turnout this election. His comments echo those made by Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley at an April party event.

“Over 50% of all voters in the United States, including Republicans and independents, are going to vote before Election Day,” said Whatley, reported the New York Post. “We have to talk to them before they vote. We need to build a national early vote program that is going to communicate through door knocks, through phone calls, through mail, through digital, through data, but we can’t wait till the week before the election.”