Forget the lies and vote early, young Republicans say

Voting has already begun in the US presidential election, and on the ground, young canvassers for Donald Trump have a challenging mission -- to persuade supporters to cast their ballots early, despite conspiracy theories long fueled by the Republican billionaire.

"With this whole new early voting thing campaign that we're pushing, it's kind of hard to sway some of the old-school conservatives," said Lala Andrews, who has spent months knocking on doors in the key swing state of Arizona.

"Most of the people I talk to have a distrust when it comes to mail-in ballots -- they tell me that something fishy happened in 2020 because of that," the young woman told AFP.

"Many Republicans want to vote on Election Day."

This is because the former president's lies still resonate with many in his own party.

Four years ago, Trump repeatedly claimed -- even before his defeat to Joe Biden -- that mail-in voting was "dangerous" and that it would lead to "massive electoral fraud."

Now embroiled in a tight race against Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump has largely reversed his position.

In rallies, he now regularly implores supporters to vote early -- while sometimes still falling back on tirades against "corrupt" mail-in voting.

It is this fluctuating message that Turning Point Action, a conservative campaign group that says it employs thousands of canvassers like Andrews in Arizona, must take to Republican voters.

- 'Too big to rig' -

The group's founder, 31-year-old Charlie Kirk, has a large fan base, particularly among young Americans.

When AFP interviewed him in Nevada in early October, he insisted that the 2020 election was clearly "stolen," in part due to early voting.

That has not stopped Kirk from delivering impassioned pleas to audiences of several hundred students to vote early this time, telling them that Trump's lead must be "too big to rig."

Faced with that contradiction, Kirk -- who runs a wider network of pro-Trump Turning Point groups -- prefers to advise supporters to personally drop off their early ballots at polling stations before November 5.

He says this is preferable to the risk of mail-in ballots going missing -- something that is vanishingly rare in reality.

During her door-to-door visits with prospective voters, Andrews repeats this strategy.

"My main message is 'Drop off your ballot yourself. Don't mail it in, because of the margin of error,'" she explained.

Andrews provides the address of the closest polling station to voters, and calls them after her visits to find out if they have voted.

If they don't answer the phone, she returns to their houses.

"I'm very persistent. We're not playing this year, we can't risk it," she said, with a smile.

Democrats have typically been more likely to vote early, which eliminates the risk of last-minute circumstances -- work commitments, sick children, or bad weather -- preventing them from doing so on Election Day.

But this year, Republicans want to change their party faithful's habits.

- Targeting Republicans -

For this election, Trump has taken an unprecedented gamble by entrusting the bulk of his canvassing operations to external groups rather than the Republican Party itself.

The field campaign relies in particular on two organizations -- the Elon Musk-financed political action committee America PAC, and Turning Point Action, which has raised more than $100 million.

Despite polls showing an incredibly close race, these two groups are not focusing their resources on undecided voters in the few swing states that will likely decide the election.

Instead, using databases, they are targeting people who have previously voted for Republican candidates, but who do not always show up at the polls.

Turning Point Action is especially concentrated on such voters in three battlegrounds: Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Kirk points out that American voter turnout rates are typically lower than in other democracies.

"Finding people that agree with you and then increasing the volume of voters is a better use of time than just trying to persuade people in the middle," he told AFP at a rally in Tucson, Arizona.

Still, the effectiveness of his group and its tactics remain unproven.

In Arizona, independent voters make up a third of the electorate.

Rusty Bowers, a former elected official in Arizona's Republican Party, said several Trumpist candidates backed by Turning Point Action had lost their mid-term races in 2022.

The group is "effective in destroying Republicans they don't like," he said.

"But they're not that effective in electing all of their own people."