In December, Donald Trump called for the end of mail-in voting in presidential elections. In February, he told Michigan voters that \u201cmail-in voting is totally corrupt.\u201d He later told Fox News host Laura Ingraham that \u201cif you have mail-in balloting, you automatically have fraud.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe ballots are a disaster,\u201d he said earlier this month to British TV host Nigel Farage, without offering evidence and despite having voted by mail himself in recent elections. \u201cAny time the mail is involved, you\u2019re going to have cheating. It\u2019s too bad people don\u2019t say it. They don\u2019t want to say it.\u201d<\/p>\n
That message is complicating plans by officials at Trump\u2019s campaign and the Republican National Committee to orchestrate aggressive efforts in key battleground states to persuade voters to cast their ballots early and by mail. Party officials say the efforts are crucial to win the election.<\/p>\n
In an interview, RNC Chairman Michael Whatley said the party would spend considerable money \u2014 he would not say how much \u2014 to encourage voters to vote by mail and help collect ballots, a practice known as ballot harvesting that is legal in some states but that Trump has decried.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve got to get every one of our voters to vote, no matter the method,\u201d Whatley said. \u201cWe want people to use mail-in voting where it is legal. We want people to ballot harvest where it\u2019s legal. We want to comply with the laws in every state.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump advisers say their get-out-the-vote effort will include persuading people to vote by mail if they believe it is the method the person is likely to use based on their voting history, including making sure ballots are mailed to people who request them.<\/p>\n
Whatley said he believed more than 50 percent of American voters would cast their ballots before Election Day. A record 69 percent of Americans voted by mail or voted early in 2020, according to the Census Bureau, though some of that was probably driven by the coronavirus pandemic. \u201cWe will be talking to those voters before they go vote,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Faith in voting systems has become polarized along partisan lines, thanks in no small part to Trump\u2019s vilification of the system and his refusal to accept that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll last year found that only 22 percent of Republicans had high confidence that votes in the 2024 presidential election would be counted accurately, compared with 71 percent of Democrats. Roughly 6 in 10 Republicans opposed allowing people to vote by mail without an excuse, versus only 13 percent of Democrats.<\/p>\n
Republican officials privately say that whether Republican voters adapt to early in-person and mail voting could swing the 2024 election in closely contested states. But those efforts remain in tension with the fraud claims that animate Trump and the grass-roots MAGA movement.<\/p>\n
Essentially, they are trying to persuade Trump voters to participate in voting methods that he falsely says are responsible for rampant fraud and cost him the White House four years ago.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe hear it at the doors, some Republicans are still very reluctant now to drop their ballots in the mail,\u201d said Jon Seaton, an Arizona Republican strategist who advised the state\u2019s Republican senator John McCain. \u201cPresident Trump clearly has a great deal of influence with Republican voters, so his support of mail-in voting will have a real impact on how many Republicans ultimately return their ballots by mail.\u201d<\/p>\n
In response to detailed questions for this article, a Trump spokesman referred The Washington Post to a video Trump taped for the RNC that praised early voting.<\/p>\n
Republican strategists have privately warned Trump\u2019s campaign that there are a number of states where having an aggressive early-voting and mail-in voting effort is imperative, including Georgia and Arizona. Georgia doesn\u2019t have partisan voter registration, but more than 1.7 million people voted early in person and about 191,000 voted by mail out of 3.5 million ballots cast in the December 2022 Senate runoff. Early voting was concentrated in Democrat-rich metro Atlanta counties such as Fulton, DeKalb, Cobb and Gwinnett.<\/p>\n
Cody Hall, a GOP strategist who is a senior adviser to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R), said Trump\u2019s rhetoric against mail-in ballots hurt him in the state in 2020, and \u201cit\u2019s totally possible it cost him the last election.\u201d Hall said he also hasn\u2019t seen signs yet of a dedicated GOP campaign to encourage early voting in Georgia this year.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe messaging is one thing, but the resources are just as, if not more, important,\u201d he said. \u201cYou have to actually do it. I\u2019ve been screaming it from the mountaintop. You\u2019ve got to have the money to execute this.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 2022, in Arizona\u2019s Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and more than half of the state\u2019s voters, Republicans trailed early ballot returns from four years earlier, according to an analysis of voter data by The Post. Republicans submitted 330,000 ballots, a return rate of 49 percent, down from a 63 percent return rate in 2018. In Nevada, Democrats returned about 105,400 ballots out of 605,000 mailed in 2022, versus 85,000 out of 540,000 for Republicans.<\/p>\n
In Pennsylvania, Republicans in 2022 requested just under 300,000 mail ballots and returned about 263,000, compared with almost 975,000 Democratic requests, of which about 857,000 were returned, according to data from the secretary of state.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt will be a huge factor in Pennsylvania,\u201d said David Urban, a Trump ally who ran the former president\u2019s efforts in Pennsylvania in 2016. \u201cIf we\u2019re not playing, we do so at our own peril.\u201d<\/p>\n
Urban said Republican groups in the state are already spending to boost mail-in voting, partially due to Trump\u2019s loss in the state and what happened in 2022, when Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) secured more than 1 million votes before the first debate, he said. They are doing that even as some lawmakers in Pennsylvania are trying to curb early-voting options.<\/p>\n
A person close to Trump said the hope is that Trump will largely leave the topic alone publicly and not sabotage the efforts. Campaign and RNC officials are citing comments he has made at times encouraging Republicans to vote by mail as long as it is legal, saying the other side does it. \u201cHe\u2019s never going to embrace voting by mail for the whole country,\u201d according to this person, who like some others spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal private discussions.<\/p>\n
Another adviser said that in conversations about mail-in voting, Trump says it is \u201cfraudulent\u201d and that \u201che\u2019s suspicious of the postal workers, of anyone who could touch the ballot.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump adviser Susie Wiles has repeatedly told him that people vote by mail safely in Florida and that he won overwhelmingly, while also reminding him that he even voted by mail. In 2020, she was able to persuade Trump to tweet that voters in Florida should use mail because the state was safe, and Wiles has argued that the campaign should spend money and time promoting mail-in voting, people who have heard her arguments say.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think we can get him there,\u201d the person close to Trump said, adding that the former president is relentlessly focused on winning, given the stakes for him financially and personally.<\/p>\n
Former RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel emphasized the importance of encouraging early voting during her farewell speech at the RNC meeting in Houston earlier this month. \u201cIf Republicans succeed in getting Republicans to vote early and ballot harvest where legal, Donald Trump will win in November,\u201d she said. \u201cIt really is that simple.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even though campaign finance laws make it more complicated for outside groups to run field operations, several are venturing into ballot-chasing this cycle, in part out of concern about perceived shortcomings on the part of official party committees. The right-wing youth group Turning Point Action said it has raised tens of millions of dollars to deploy hundreds of full-time organizers to Arizona and Wisconsin, with Georgia to follow.<\/p>\n
Describing the pitch to Trump supporters who are skeptical of early and mail voting, Turning Point spokesman Andrew Kolvet said, \u201cWe\u2019re not saying we don\u2019t have election integrity concerns, we\u2019re saying if we don\u2019t show up and play the game with the rules as written, we don\u2019t have a shot at all.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sentinel Action Fund, a super PAC associated with the Heritage Foundation\u2019s political arm, is raising money to turn out low-propensity voters to vote early or by mail in key Senate races in Ohio, Montana and Pennsylvania. In a research memo circulated in March, the group recommended telling voters that voting early helps prevent potential Election Day mistakes, limits potential voter fraud and ensures their votes will be properly counted, and reduces the email, mail and phone calls they receive during the campaign season.<\/p>\n
\u201cRepublicans can no longer solely rely on \u2018day-of\u2019 voters to win elections,\u201d the fund\u2019s president, Jessica Anderson, wrote in the memo. \u201cWe can and should do two things at once: call for election integrity reforms and utilize all tactics needed to win including mail in ballots, ballot chasing where legal, early vote and Election Day turnout.\u201d<\/p>\n
Marianne LeVine contributed to this report.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
In December, Donald Trump called for the end of mail-in voting in presidential elections. In February, he told Michigan voters that \u201cmail-in voting is totally corrupt.\u201d He later told Fox News host Laura Ingraham that \u201cif you have mail-in balloting, you automatically have fraud.\u201d \u201cThe ballots are a disaster,\u201d he said earlier this month to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":2506,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2505"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2505\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}