Donald Trump keeps sending out mixed messages on early and mail-in voting, portending a repeat of the 2020 cycle, in which Democrats got out the vote early, the key to a 7 million vote landslide for Joe Biden.
“In this election, we must use every appropriate tool to beat the radical left Democrats. That’s why I am urging every Virginia patriot to vote early, and don’t wait,” Trump said during a campaign tele-rally hosted by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin on Sunday.
A day later, at an in-person rally in Pennsylvania, Trump was back to his 2020 routine of making early voting out to be a scam.
“Now we have this stupid stuff, where you can vote 45 days early. I wonder what the hell happens during that 45,” Trump said, before launching into an imaginary conversation between poll workers trying to “fix” an election.
“Let’s move the, see these votes? We’ve got about a million votes in there. Let’s move them. We’re fixing the air conditioner in the room, right?” Trump fantasized.
Then, back to whatever reality he lives in:
“No, it’s terrible,” Trump condescended, as is his manner. “What happened the last time was disgraceful, including right here. But we’re not going to let it happen again. Too, you know, too big to rig, right?”
MAGA would be forgiven for assuming the message from their dear leader was, don’t vote early, because those votes won’t count.
The muddled message seems likely to give Democrats, again, the edge in early voting, which is important in that you get committed voters locked in early, allowing campaigns to focus on the fence-sitters in the closing days and on Election Day itself.
For instance, early voting in Virginia began last Friday, and 106,580 people had already cast their ballots for the 2024 election as of the close of the business day on Monday, according to the Virginia Public Access Project.
For context: at this point in the 2020 early-voting cycle, we were at 76,637 votes cast in Virginia, so where we are now is up 39.1 percent.
Yep, there’s more interest this time around, and that’s over a 2020 presidential cycle that saw, by an order of magnitude, the most voters ever.
More context: 4,460,524 votes were cast in Virginia in the 2020 election cycle, per the Virginia Department of Elections.
So, we’ve still got a ways to go.
It doesn’t make sense, at first glance, that Trump continues to throw shade at early voting, given the obvious advantages that early voting can give to campaigns, even down to the simple, you don’t have to worry about bad weather on Election Day keeping your voters from getting out to the polls.
I think what we’re seeing here is, early voting is only an advantage if you think the math favors you, and the Trump-era Republican Party has an obvious math problem, in that it can’t get more than 46 percent nationwide.
Trump has made a big deal about getting 11 million more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016, but the problem for him on that is, Biden got 15 million more votes in 2020 than Hillary Clinton did in 2016.
If you’re game-planning for the Trump side in 2024, you have to assume you’ve not only maxed out what you can get percentage-wise, but certainly, now, in terms of the raw numbers.
The path to victory, then, isn’t in getting even more people to vote than turned out in 2020, but in trying to tamp down the overall number of voters, the hope there being, if we can get our voters out, and suppress even a portion of the turnout on the other side, between that and the archaic Electoral College, we can sneak another one out like we did back in 2016.
I mean, you could also just run a better candidate, whose appeal isn’t just to racists, misogynists, xenophobes, scared old folks and low-information young voters, but that’s another story for another day.
The party is still Trump’s, for now.
Youngkin, who was the preferred 2024 candidate of the money Republicans, before he blundered his way toward losing the 2023 Virginia General Assembly mid-terms, made that clear in the call that he hosted for Trump on Sunday.
“I just want to send a message very clearly and very loudly that we are going to put strength back in the White House,” Youngkin said during the call.
Remember how Youngkin, back in the 2021 election, was doing everything he could to distance himself from Trump, who in 2022 denigrated the governor in a social-media swipe, typing out his name to read “Young Kin,” and said his name “sounds Chinese”?
They all end up bending the knee, don’t they?
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Chris Graham
