Donald Trump has finally accepted the inevitable. If he wants to win re-election, he needs Republicans to vote by mail.
On Friday, the former president took to social media to encourage Republicans to embrace early voting and voting by mail.
The post is a remarkable change from Trump. The New York Post explained that Trump has previously expressed concerns about mail-in voting.
The posting suggests Trump is trying to broaden the horizons of GOP voters — long suspicious of all but in person same-day voting.
While Trump has in the past said he’s OK with absentee ballots — mail-in ballots which require for reason for the request like illness or disability — he has long had issues with widespread use of mail-in ballots for the general population.
The practice became common in many states during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Trump has spent years insisting that mail-in voting was ripe for abuse and contributed to the voter fraud he claimed delivered the 2020 election to President Biden.
In March, newly-installed co-chair of the Republican National Committee Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter in law, said that the party was moving on from the 2020 election.
“I think we’re past that. I think that’s in the past,” Lara Trump told NBC News when she was asked whether it will be the RNC’s position that the 2020 election was not fairly decided.
“The past is the past, and unfortunately, we had to learn a couple of hard lessons in 2020,” she continued. “Believe me, we are applying them all across this country in every single state, and we want to ensure that, indeed, every single legal vote is counted.”
According to The Washington Post, “Republican officials privately say that whether Republican voters adapt to early in-person and mail voting could swing the 2024 election in closely contested states. But those efforts remain in tension with the fraud claims that animate Trump and the grass-roots MAGA movement.”
Trump lost several close states in 2020 and GOP reluctance to vote by mail has been pointed to as the easiest fix to the Trump campaign in 2024 as it tries to unseat an unpopular, incumbent president.
