After years of disinformation and outright lies about methods that make it easy to vote, such as mail-in ballots, Trump and his MAGA Mob have done a U-turn in the middle of heavy traffic. The Bloviator-in-Chief finally gave in to month’s of effort by his advisors to convince him that all votes count and posted one of his all-caps screeds on his social media site, Truth Social (what a contradiction in two terms) that ABSENTEE VOTING, EARLY VOTING, AND ELECTION DAY VOTING ARE ALL GOOD OPTIONS. The GOP is even pushing ballot harvesting, after decrying it as ‘ripe for fraud’ for a long time, even asking donors to provide money to support it. In fund-raising emails, many sent out by Bryon Donaldson, (R-FL), they are going full throttle encouraging the method.
There’s just one tiny little problem.
Their disinformation campaigns were so successful, they’re having a hard time getting Republican voters to go along with this change in direction. Even ousted RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, in 2023, wasn’t totally on board with ballot harvesting. Furthermore, many GOP voters still distrust mail-in voting. According to a 2023 Associated Press/NORC Center for Public Affairs poll, 62 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters are against allowing people to vote by mail without an excuse as opposed to 70 percent of Democrats who support no-excuse by-mail voting.
To further complicate this sudden shift in strategy, Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country have introduced or enacted hundreds of bills and laws to suppress voting. In April 2021, for example, the Brennan Center for Justice reported that legislatures in 47 states had introduced 361 bills containing provisions that would make it harder for people to vote.
The road ahead for Republican contenders in the 2024 elections will be an uphill one, and they will first have to get themselves out of the deep hole they spent so many years digging. If they’re lucky, maybe they’ll convince the die-hard opponents of mail in voting in time for the 2028 elections.