In the wake of the Democratic Party’s performance in the 2020 presidential and 2022 midterm elections, former President Donald Trump’s campaign is exploring ways to win over the mail-in vote.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump’s staff is reviewing state laws on absentee and mail-in voting, as well as ballot harvesting. As a result of comments made by some GOP 2024 presidential hopefuls, such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, Trump, who was notoriously critical of mail-in votes after the 2020 election, is changing his tune.
The party has been criticized for focusing too much on Election Day turnout in recent elections, failing to capitalize on opportunities.
A grassroots fundraising email Trump sent out earlier read:
“The radical Democrats have used ballot harvesting to cancel out YOUR vote and walk away with elections that they NEVER should have won. But I’m doing something HUGE to fight back.”
Our path forward is to MASTER the Democrats’ own game of harvesting ballots in every state we can. But that also means we need to start laying the foundation for victory RIGHT NOW.”
The former president now 2024 hopeful told Breitbart News that “a mail-in ballot will always be corrupt,”
“The system, it’s not a question of being broken — the system is corrupt. It’s a corrupt system. A mail-in ballot will always be corrupt. When you go to a polling location and they want your identification and everything, the way — you can’t really vote unless it’s a legit deal.”
Trump continued “If you have mail-in ballots, nobody has any idea where it’s coming from or where it’s going to and then it travels through so many hands. Jimmy Carter came out a long time ago with a number of highly respected people and they wrote something, and the one thing that come out loud and clear is that mail-in ballots are corrupt. France had it, a lot of countries had it and they went away from it now.”
The former president continued to slam the Left, “But you can shame the hell out of people and you can shame the Democrats. The Democrats know it’s corrupt and the Democrats should want to fix it but they don’t because they do have an advantage under that system. For the time, though, we have to live with the system that stinks so we have to fight it like they do, which is your question.”
It is important for Republicans to find ways to make elections more secure. Other Republicans have noted that the GOP simply needs to use whatever means necessary to win over voters. The Republican National Committee was looking into the issue following the midterms last November since more than 60 percent of Democrats voted by mail in 2020, compared to 30 percent of Republicans.
Arizona GOP candidate Blake Masters who lost in a close race this past November pointed out, “We simply have to beat them at this.”