The Republican Party is dumping tens of millions of dollars into early voting campaigns only to keep getting sabotaged by one persistent foe: its nominee for president, former Oval Office holder Donald Trump.
According to a report in Politico, Republican strategists and organizers are variously baffled and fuming that their party’s election conspiracist standard bearer won’t stop attacking early and mail voting with invented claims that they’re unreliable or rife with fraud.
“The whole idea behind absentee voting is you’re banking that vote, you’ve got that person, you know they’re going to vote for you, you get them off the list,” Wisconsin-based GOP strategist Mark Graul told the news outlet. “This is how you get the extra 5,000, 10,000 votes that may decide the election.”
As for Republican voter turnout, Graul noted Trump’s conspiratorial nonsense “screws it up.”
The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee are running a country-wide “Swamp the Vote” campaign as part of multi-million dollar efforts to get their supporters to vote early.
For example, Republican friendly groups and PACs are spending $12 million in Pennsylvania to get voters to use mail balloting in the swing state state, and Politico reported they were a third of the way to their goal of signing up 200,000 to the mail voting list in August.
Politico noted that Trump campaign rallies even have signs encouraging people to do so, while the former president frequently reads canned lines from a teleprompter reminding voters they can cast a ballot before election day.
But that hasn’t stopped Trump, who has repeatedly and baselessly attacked the veracity of the 2020 election that he lost to President Joe Biden from, calling early voting “stupid stuff” at a rally last month (moments after he read a canned line encouraging people to do it). Last month, Trump falsely claimed Democrats are abusing overseas mail-in ballots to get around voter citizenship requirements. He has also repeatedly attacked the US Postal service as “incompetent” or ill-equipped to handle ballots.
“It’s counterproductive,” David Urban, a former Trump campaign adviser who led the GOP nominee’s successful Pennsylvania efforts in 2016, told Politico.
“You have to accept it in order to have a chance to win,” added Tom Eddy, GOP chair in Pennsylvania’s Erie County, to the news outlet. “And that’s what we’re doing. We’ve been pushing these things like crazy.”
So far, Trump seems unconvinced.
