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This year, for the first time, Republicans are spending tens of millions of dollars to get Republicans to vote early. But they have a problem—their own candidate. While the RNC is urging voters to cast their ballot early, Donald Trump is telling them it's stupid and mail carriers could "lose hundreds of thousands of ballots, maybe purposefully." He also attacked the practice of all states sending absentee ballots to overseas and military voters as a way to evade citizenship checks.
David Urban, a former Trump senior adviser, said: "It's counterproductive. We're kind of pushing a message, and then the president comes and says, 'I'm not so big on that.' It's much more difficult to convince people." The RNC and allied groups want to get reliable Republican voters to vote early so that they can later work on the marginal voters, but Trump keeps throwing sand in the gears by talking constantly about mail-voting fraud. In many states, the state party has a list of people they think will vote for Trump. They want to be able to cross off as many as possible before Election Day, so they can focus on the remaining low-propensity voters on the final day. But if few Republicans vote early, the state parties will have long lists of potential Republican voters and won't be able to contact all of them on Election Day. Republican strategist Mark Graul in Wisconsin said: "Trump's scaremongering screws it up."
RNC and party officials have been crisscrossing the country giving out the message that voting early is safe and convenient and then Trump tells the voters that their vote might not count if they vote before Election Day. It is not helpful. In fact, it is worse than that because if the RNC had realized early on that Trump was going to defeat their campaign, they would have spent their money in other ways.
In Pennsylvania, for example, the failure is very clear. Only a quarter of the mail ballots requested have been from Republicans, and so far less than one-fifth of the ballots returned already have been from Republicans. In Virginia, Democrats are mailing ballots in at a higher rate than Republicans.
Nearly every step of the way Trump has undermined the RNC. In January, after winning the Iowa caucuses, Trump said mail-in ballots beget "crooked elections." In June in Detroit, he called them "treacherous." In September he said the USPS could lose ballots either through incompetence or purposefully. Gee, he and Democrats agree on that one, although Democrats attribute the problem to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who is still on the job. Republican National Committeeman Andy Reilly of Pennsylvania put it gently: "It does send a mixed message."
Not only is Trump at odds with the RNC and allied super PACs, but he is also at odds with his own spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt. She said the former president "has encouraged all Americans to vote absentee, early, or in-person on Election Day." In reality, he has only encouraged the third of the three options. It must be tough being a spokeswoman for Trump and having to lie like that. On the other hand, maybe one day Leavitt will run for governor of Arkansas. (V)