During the middle of yet another rambling rant about how the 2020 election had been stolen from him, Donald Trump claimed on Sunday that his sole path to a victory over Kamala Harris is to make voting mandatory in battleground states.
“The only way to avoid this miserable thing for America is if Wisconsin and the entire Midwest turn and, I mean, turn out in record numbers,” the former president told rally goers in Juneau, Wisconsin.
“We need a mandate in the vote, and we’re going to get it,” he said. At one point during the rally, Trump mused that the 2024 election will be the “greatest political victory in American history”—for him, of course.
The GOP presidential nominee’s voting tangent included several hopeful predictions of massive voter turnout.
“We’re going to have numbers maybe never been seen before,” he said before claiming—falsely— that in 2020 he got “more votes, by far, by millions, than any sitting president in the history of the United States.”
In fact, Trump lost the presidential election to Joe Biden, who won 306 electoral votes, well more than the 270 needed. Biden also carried just over 51 percent of the popular vote.
The former president seemingly contradicted himself later in his speech, accusing many of his supporters of not showing up at the ballot box, namely Evangelicals and “rifle owners.”
“The Evangelicals don’t vote that much, and if they did vote, we could never lose an election,” Trump claimed. In 2020 he managed to lose the presidential election after 84 percent of white Evangelicals voted for him.
In the lead up to election day, Trump and his allies have increased their messaging about alternative ways to cast ballots for the Republican Party, spending tens of millions of dollars to promote early voting campaigns. Elon Musk even went so far as to urge MAGA fans to “drag” people to vote during a Saturday rally in Pennsylvania.
