In yet another sign that the new, Donald Trump-controlled Republican National Committee has no purpose other than to serve an as extension of Trump’s persona, the Lara Trump vanity project commonly known as the RNC has now officially abandoned efforts to encourage Republicans to vote early and through mail-in ballots.
Rather than acknowledge and address the fact that Republicans’ rejection of early and mail-in voting is a substantial reason their candidates keep losing, the new RNC has instead elected to double down in its meritless attempt to demonize those processes through legal challenges, essentially following the same playbook they followed in 2020 and 2022.
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The Washington Post reported Tuesday that the newly constituted RNC will abandon plans previously sought by numerous Republicans to encourage early and mail-in voting among the registered Republicans it purports to represent. The discontinued “Bank Your Vote” initiative will be replaced by an effort to connect with “less likely Trump voters” in a new program called “Grow The Vote.”
MSNBC’s Ja’han Jones emphasizes the implications of this abandonment of early voting efforts by RNC:
In a victory for the extremist wing of the Republican Party, it looks like Donald Trump’s hand-picked leadership team at the Republican National Committee has officially scrapped the GOP’s plan to encourage early voting this election cycle. Instead, the party is taking steps to prioritize legal challenges to voting systems ahead of November.
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This appears to be a realization of the far right’s goal of focusing the Republican Party on election-related “lawfare,” that is legal challenges designed to restrict ballot access and undercut election systems in ways that make it harder to vote.
Jones explains that the shift in strategy essentially suggests that the Republican Party won’t be expending much, if any, effort trying to change the minds of those who previously voted for President Joe Biden. Rather, it will spend its efforts trying to suppress those voters.
Nothing screams “We can’t win a majority of voters fairly” like prioritizing legal attacks on voting rights. But that’s precisely what the Trump-branded RNC is preparing to do. Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law and the current RNC co-chair, claimed “massive resources” will go to its so-called election integrity division.
There are some obvious takeaways from this move. First, the GOP is not a party that cares one whit about the voting public. Early and mail-in voting measures are popular (and always have been) because they respond to the needs and schedules of ordinary voters. Early and mail-in voting options increase voter participation, which—theoretically—ought to be something applauded by both parties. Despite Republicans’ feverish claims to the contrary, there has been no evidence of widespread fraud associated with early or mail-in voting, which is why Republicans have belatedly reversed course and begun to encourage it among their constituents.
Second, and perhaps most significantly, this is a downright boneheaded strategy, for multiple reasons. The Democratic states Trump really, really needs to win—Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin, for example—all have Democratic governors and Democratic secretaries of state. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has a Republican, Al Schmidt, but he was appointed by Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro. Shapiro is about as ardent a foe of election denialism and interference as anyone can imagine.
Put simply, these states are not going to be receptive to rehashed lies about the integrity of their voting systems or attempts to suppress the vote.
But the Lara Trump-led reversal of the RNC’s prior tentative efforts to acknowledge that yes, losing mail-in voters was killing them? That’s even less comprehensible.
As MSNBC’s Jones notes, “In reality, there’s ample evidence that allowing people to vote by mail doesn’t have a partisan effect (and if it does, data shows the impact appears to favor Republicans).” The latter point requires that Republican voters actually take advantage of early or mail-in voting, which they most certainly don’t do when they’ve been propagandized against it by Donald Trump, like they were in the last two national elections.
This new Trump-inspired policy—coupled with the RNC’s announcement this week at it will abandon all its minority outreach efforts—simply confirms that the Republican Party will once again be saddled with carrying the weight of Donald Trump’s prejudices and delusions throughout the 2024 cycle.
How did that work out for them before? Not well. But it sure is nice for Democrats to know these things in advance.
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