by Ben Whedon
During the 2020 presidential election, there was a piercing raise in the prevalence of early voting and mail-in voting practices across the country, highlighted by former President Donald Trump’s claims that massive voter fraud influenced the outcome. According to the Pew Research Center, 46% of voters in the 2020 race voted by post or by correspondence, and 27% admitted that they had voted earlier.
Republicans were later reluctant to pursue such practices, although needy midterm results and a shift in the presumptive GOP nominee’s position on the issue appear to have prompted Republicans to rethink their approach.
The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee announced Tuesday the debut of its “Fight the vote” aimed at mobilizing swing state voters and encouraging the operate of mail-in, mail-in and early voting.
“Republicans must win and we will use all appropriate tools to defeat Democrats because they are destroying our country. Whether you vote by mail, absentee, in person or on Election Day, we will protect your vote,” Trump said in a statement. “We’re making sure your vote is safe and your voice is heard. We need to flood radical Democrats with massive turnout. The way to win is to swamp them, if we swamp them with votes they won’t be able to cheat. You need to prepare a plan, register and vote in any way possible. We need to get your vote.”
Trump spoke further Thursday at a “Chase the Vote” town hall in Maricopa County, Arizona, a municipality that has been widely discussed in Trump’s claims of election fraud as well as former Arizona Republican Party candidate Kari Lake’s election challenges.
At the event, hosted by Turning Point Action, Trump especially focused on evangelical and gun-owning votersmaintaining that none of the traditionally Republican-leaning voting blocs voted in sufficient numbers.
“Gun owners, for whatever reason, don’t vote,” he continued. “We have to get the evangelicals, we have to get the gun owners. We have to convince these people to vote.”
“We need a victory that is too big to fake. You know what it means. We need everyone to get out and vote,” he urged, touting Swamp the Vote and directing supporters to the initiative’s website.
The GOP’s evolving position on mail-in and early voting
“I call them the fraudulent voice shop. This is mail in ballots. “We shouldn’t be sending absentee ballots unless someone is very, very sick or the military is far away,” he added. Trump said “Only news, no noise” TV program in October 2022
“We should switch to paper ballots like they did in France. Thirty-six million people (voted) and there was no dispute among them. Everyone had paper ballots and it was a one-day vote. They didn’t store them there in the corner and you see the boxes moving everywhere,” he added.
By March 2023, following a needy midterm election result for Republicans, Trump reluctantly accepted that Republicans have “no choice” but to opt for early voting, mail-in voting and ballot harvesting.
“In states where vote harvesting is still legal, we have no choice but to beat Democrats at their own game,” he said that same month. “Either we start collecting ballots or you just wave goodbye to our country… We have to be smart.”
Ballot harvesting means the collection of ballots by third parties. While Republicans have generally begun to embrace the practice in states where it is legal, GOP strongholds like Alabama have already done so decided to ban it.
“Store your voice” vs. “Slow down your voice”
Last June, the Republican National Committee announced its “Bank Your Vote” initiative, aimed at competing with Democrats, who have traditionally outperformed the GOP with early and mail-in voting.
“We have voters who like to vote on Election Day and we need to make it clear to them that we cannot allow Democrats to gain an advantage. We don’t want to wait until the fourth quarter to start scoring touchdowns when you have four quarters to score points,” then-RNC chairwoman – said Ronna McDaniel.
The Bank Your Vote program did not appear in the midterm or presidential election contests. Since then, McDaniel’s resignation and the appointment of Trump’s leadership team have caused the party to reassess its efforts. Former North Carolina GOP chairman Michael Whatley became RNC chairwoman, and in March, Lara Trump became co-chairwoman.
The Backfill the voting program is the successor to Bank Your Vote. Pressed on the differences between the previous program and the campaign’s current efforts, Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt stated that “Swamp the Vote” is “a highly targeted and data-backed specialized effort designed to maximize turnout among specific voting groups, which helps us achieve our overall goals” vote math needed to secure victory.”
She further stated that efforts would be directed towards “[t]the voters we need most to achieve the necessary vote math to win each state.
The program’s website now includes Trump’s video appeal and resources to check voter registration, apply for a ballot, pledge to vote early and pledge to vote on Election Day. The effort was praised by some related organizations.
“I have to commend the RNC and Lara Trump for actually taking action and recognizing that this needs to be a top priority,” American First Works executive director Ashley Hayek told “Only news, no noise” in an interview that will air later this week.
Some Republicans, however, see the need to go beyond existing efforts and significantly expand the party’s efforts to reach low-propensity voters.
“There is a lot more work to be done. Some people think the November election is five months away, when in fact we’re only three months away… In some of these states, people are going to start voting right away,” said Lee Zeldin, a former GOP candidate for New York governor in the same year. program.
Challenges
While the GOP and Trump campaigns may be contributing to overcoming Republican shortfalls in mail-in and early voting, Zeldin emphasized that the Democratic Party has not remained passive in the meantime and that changing electoral laws in Democratic-led swing states could provide both a greater impetus for adaptation for GOP and an obstacle to the party’s efforts.
“[I]some of these states have adopted fresh election laws, such as Pennsylvania with a universal mail-in voting system, and Nevada, where early voting is more common, has legalized ballot harvesting,” he further added. “When I see a poll that comes back and says that maybe President Trump is two points ahead and Pennsylvania and Nevada are ahead, he’s not. Because we need to do much more to reach low-propensity voters, no-propensity voters, people who haven’t voted at all. Or if I don’t, we’ll go into Election Day and we’ll have already lost Pennsylvania and some of the other places.”
For example, Democratic Governor of Pennsylvania Josh Shapiro: introduced automatic voter registration last year, meaning residents applying for an ID card and driver’s license will automatically be registered to vote in the state. The move raised concerns from Trump himself, who called the move “a disaster for Republican elections, including your favorite president, ME!”
“That is why we are deeply committed to this effort. There are many groups that are either already starting to knock on doors or are planning to start knocking in August and September,” Zeldin continued. “We need the people who are there [to] watch, sign up, whether you volunteer for a shift, are a poll worker, or maybe you want to take time off from work, or maybe you’re looking for a job at all. There are specific states across the country where we need more leadership[ship]”
Other group efforts
Moreover, beyond the campaign and the RNC, united groups have identified a need to strengthen the party’s efforts to reach low-propensity voters.
“Starting late last year, we went county by county and assessed what needed to be done and where gaps existed. Where should we recruit more observers and poll workers? Who is in charge of curing the vote?” Hayek said. “So we identified county by county what issues we need to address.”
“America First Policy Institute has an incredible legal team that is actively and proactively filing lawsuits. And then we created an election integrity checklist to make sure that, you know, we’re able to go in ahead of time and take a look at the machines and make sure that certain things are done ahead of time to prepare us to make this election run as smoothly as possible.” she continued.
Hayek then turned his attention to the most crucial municipalities and key voting blocs that AFW is trying to reach to improve electoral prospects.
“[W]“We are focusing on 19 counties in nine states,” she said. “Each county has about 400,000 to 450,000 people. And if we could shift public sentiment by about 2% in 2020, we could win those states.”
For example, “the state of Wisconsin had 77,000 guns [owners] who did not vote in the elections. We lost the state by about 40,000 votes,” Hayek said. “The other thing we noticed is that in our three top voting states, women have a 10 percentage point voter turnout over men. So if you think about North Carolina, Georgia and Florida, women will ultimately decide the state. So this is where we have to make really strategic decisions about our message and our reach.”
The RNC did not provide a separate response Only news requests for comment.
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Ben Whedon is an editor and reporter for Just the News. Follow him X, formerly Twitter.
Photo “Voting by post” by Lbeaumont. CC BY-SA 4.0.
