Republicans are desperate to get out the vote this November any way they can—and that includes voting by mail.
“We’ve got to get every one of our voters to vote, no matter the method,” Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley told the Washington Post. And the party plans to spend a lot of money on mail-in and early voting.
But the GOP has a Donald Trump-sized obstacle in its way.
The party’s presumptive nominee has staked his campaign on the lie that the previous election was stolen from him. And he’s blamed that largely on the existence of mail-in voting.
While his claims are easily debunked, that hasn’t stopped him from saying it over and over and over and over again.
He has said mail-in voting is “cheating.” He has called it “automatic fraud.” He has declared it a “disaster.” He has insisted it creates “corrupt elections.”
And that’s not just for Democrats. That’s for Republicans too.
“Any time you have mail-in ballots, you have corrupt elections. I don’t care what it is. It’s anybody that wants it,” he said at a rally last November. “They’re corrupt. And that includes Republicans, by the way.”
The strategists at the RNC know they need mail-in voting to be competitive, especially in those swing states like Arizona and Pennsylvania that Trump lost in 2020. The big question, sources told the Washington Post, is whether they can get Trump to keep his mouth shut about it.
But according to video provided by American Bridge, a Democratic research hub, the likely answer, based on Trump’s long history of attacks, is probably not.
Just watch this supercut for yourselves.
Campaign Action