Trump softens opposition to mail-in voting to boost 2024 campaign
Ryan King
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Following years of opposition to early voting, former President Donald Trump is warming up to crafting an election strategy around it.
Trump’s campaign is poring through state election laws about absentee voting, mail-in voting, and ballot collection to stake out a strategy for ginning up votes in the 2024 election cycle, the Wall Street Journal reported.
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This apparent change of tune on mail-in voting comes as Trump continues to reproach the system of voting in the public domain amid his assertions that the 2020 election was “stolen” and “rigged” against him.
“The radical Democrats have used ballot harvesting to cancel out YOUR vote and walk away with elections that they NEVER should have won. But I’m doing something HUGE to fight back,” a recent fundraising email from Trump said, per the report. “Our path forward is to MASTER the Democrats’ own game of harvesting ballots.”
Critics of the policies have decried certain state ballot collection arrangements as “ballot harvesting” — processes in which operatives collect ballots from voters to deliver to polling stations or drop-off boxes. Some Trump allies, such as conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza, have cited ballot harvesting as an example of malfeasance in the past election.
Despite his admonishment of those practices, Trump has contended that Republicans have “no choice” but to “live with the system that stinks.” Some analysts have hypothesized that Republican shortcomings in the early and mail-in voting realm contributed to their lackluster 2022 midterm election performance.
Other Republicans, such as former Arizona Senate hopeful Blake Masters, who lost to Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), have struck a similar tune.
The chasm between Republicans and Democrats on mail-in voting was particularly stark in the 2020 election during the COVID-19 pandemic, in which 60% of Democrats voted by mail, compared to 30% of Republicans, according to an analysis by the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project.
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Trump is joined in the 2024 scrum by former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, who announced her campaign in a video Tuesday and held an event Wednesday. She urged Republicans to ramp up their early voting efforts at an event last November before the Republican Jewish Coalition.
“We were completely outplayed electorally. The Democrats did a full-court press to vote early. We sat on our hands,” Haley lamented in the speech.