Former president Donald Trump, a long-time propagator of the pernicious fiction that early voting is rife with fraud, curiously plans to cast his own ballot early in this year’s presidential election.
In an interview with Fox & Friends’ Brian Kilmeade, Trump repeatedly said he had “mixed feelings” about early voting before announcing he planned to do it himself.
“The main thing is you’ve got to get out and you’ve got to vote, and I’ll be voting early,” he said.
The disclosure marks the latest twist in Trump’s complicated relationship with early voting, which regularly pits his conspiratorial impulses against the best interests of his campaign. Before and during the 2020 election, Trump frequently disparaged the early and mail-in voting processes, which he has called “dangerous,” “manipulated” “totally corrupt” and “a hoax.” After Trump lost that contest to President Joe Biden, he falsely claimed that problems with mail-in ballots cost him the election. As recent as this year, Trump called the practice “stupid” and “ridiculous.”
But there’s a good reason these alternate forms of voting exist: They increase turnout by helping people avoid Election-Day snafus or scheduling conflicts. Which is why Trump has ramped up efforts to get their people to vote early, including in recent campaign stops in Wisconsin, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
“Early voting is underway. So get everyone you know and go out and vote,” Trump said, during a particularly colorful exhortation in Detroit last week. “Go tomorrow. It’s just starting. Go and vote. Make sure you vote and bring all our friends that want to vote for us. Tell them, ‘Jill, get your fat husband off the couch. Get that fat pig off the couch. … Get him up, Jill, slap him around. Get him up. Get him up, Jill, we want him off the couch to get out and vote.’”
Some early indications suggest that pivot is working: Republican turnout is up in both Nevada and Arizona this year, The New York Times reports. In Florida, 1.1 million registered Republicans requested early ballots.
But Democrats, who have not spent the past five years muddying the waters with electoral conspiracy theories, may still enjoy an early voting advantage. In Florida, for instance, they’ve requested 1.4 million early ballots to Republicans’ 1.1 million. And Democrats overwhelmingly support early voting, according to the Pew Research Center, while such support has fallen sharply among Republicans.
