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Donald Trump’s criticisms of Americans casting absentee ballots through the mail have been nothing short of hysterical for quite a while. Shortly before Election Day 2020, for example, the Republican said mail-in ballots “are a disaster,” adding that he wanted election officials to “get rid of the ballots.”
After the election, the former president’s rhetoric grew far more agitated. “REMEMBER, YOU CAN NEVER HAVE FAIR & FREE ELECTIONS WITH MAIL-IN BALLOTS — NEVER, NEVER, NEVER,” Trump wrote by way of his social media platform last November. “WON’T AND CAN’T HAPPEN!!!” A day later, he republished the missive, adding: “NEVER!”
Last month, the tirade continued. “All Republican Governors should immediately begin the process of ENDING MAIL IN BALLOTS (which are fraught with corruption, and always will be!),” Trump wrote. He added, “Governors have the power and authority to do this. GET IT DONE, or we will never have honest elections in our Country again!”
It’s never been altogether clear how the former president came to believe any of this. None of his claims on the subject has ever reflected reality in any way, and no one from Team Trump has even tried to substantiate the whining with meaningful evidence.
But in a curious twist, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump is starting to hedge on his “NEVER, NEVER, NEVER” position.
After years of assailing early voting, Donald Trump is having a change of heart. The 2024 presidential candidate remains critical of various forms of early voting, advisers say, but his campaign is nonetheless mounting an effort to pursue such votes after Democrats excelled at doing so in recent elections. His team is studying state laws governing absentee and mail-in voting as well as ballot collection, called “ballot harvesting” by critics, in which third parties gather and turn in votes, people familiar with the effort said.
The article referenced a recent fundraising appeal Team Trump sent to donors, which said Republicans’ path forward “is to MASTER the Democrats’ own game.”
For many in his party, this is an overdue realization. “Our voters need to vote early,” Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel declared on Fox News last month. “There were many in 2020 saying, ‘Don’t vote by mail, don’t vote early,’ and we have to stop that.”
A Politico report added soon after, “As Republicans come to terms with their lackluster midterm performance, top GOP officials and conservative luminaries are acknowledging voters were led astray with calls to reject early and absentee voting.”
Media Matters also noted that even many Fox News hosts who spent years railing against mail-in and early voting are starting to realize that it “may have been a huge mistake.”
And now Trump, who did more work than anyone in American politics to turn Republican voters against standard voting practices, is hedging a bit, too.
The move makes sense — mail-in voting has become a key element to Democratic successes in recent election cycles — but as we recently discussed, it might be too late. Much of the GOP base believed Trump and his allies when they condemned early voting, mail-in balloting and ballot-collection practices, and it’s a little late in the game to tell these same voters, “Never mind.”
This post revises our related earlier coverage.