Stolen-election claims draw cheers at campaign rallies, but muddle party’s get-out-the-vote effort
WSJ Opinion
After making years of unfounded claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, Donald Trump is dialing up warnings that there could be an even bigger theft this time around, a tactic that threatens to complicate Republican turnout efforts.
“Too Big to Rig.” That is the phrase Trump began unveiling in recent weeks, including in an appearance in Greensboro, N.C. His campaign also has printed signs with the slogan to hand out to supporters. The idea behind the pitch is this: Trump needs a lead so large that no one can take it away.
“We want a landslide,” Trump said at the rally. “We have to win so that it’s too big to rig.”
The line has garnered energetic applause from the Trump faithful, but it presents messaging challenges for Republicans. Even as the former president says the voting process could be rigged, he is urging GOP supporters to participate in it anyway. Trump also needs to woo moderate and swing voters, yet they could be turned off by his drumbeat of election-fraud claims.
“There is no way to effectively toe this line,” said David Becker, director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, focused on election administration. “When you still want voters to turn out but you’re telling them it’s rigged—it’s no surprise that some of them are on the fence about that.”
Trump has paired his remarks with arguments that Republican-controlled states could better secure their elections right away by insisting on single-day, in-person voting, with identification checks. That position is at odds with intensive GOP efforts to encourage supporters to make use of early voting and mail-in ballots, methods that appeal to a growing portion of the electorate.
In the last presidential contest, Republicans fell far behind Democrats on those sorts of turnout initiatives, in large part because Trump derided alternative voting methods as ripe for fraud.
“If you have mail-in voting, you automatically have fraud,” Trump said last month in a town hall hosted by Fox News.
Before 2020, Democratic voters made slightly more use of mail-in ballots than Republicans, but the difference became far more pronounced in the last presidential election, with 60% of Democratic voters choosing to vote by mail while only 32% of Republicans did so, according to a 2021 report from the MIT Election Data and Science Lab.
While a “metric ton” of mail-in voting was driven by states’ response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump’s criticism of the practice “single-handedly drove a pretty radical shift in the mode by which the electorate chose to vote,” creating the sharp partisan divide, said Loyola Law School Prof. Justin Levitt.
Before they dropped out of the Republican presidential nomination race, Trump’s main competitors, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, said the party squandered recent elections by focusing too much on Election Day turnout.
Experts say mail-in voting is no more susceptible to fraud than other types of voting.
The Republican National Committee is in the middle of a multiyear push aimed at maximizing voting before Election Day by encouraging GOP supporters to make use of any voting opportunity they like. The initiative includes the use of get-out-the-vote operatives to collect batches of voters’ ballots to deliver them to the polls—which Republicans previously derided as “ballot harvesting” when practiced by Democrats. Among those endorsing third-party ballot collection is Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law and new co-chair of the RNC.
Committee officials said they didn’t believe Trump’s campaign speeches would sink their effort, noting that the party and Trump each were focused on the importance of election security.
“Republicans will fight in every state to turn out the vote and will utilize every legal process to get voters to the polls and chase ballots across the country,” said RNC Chairman Michael Whatley. “We will take advantage of mail voting while fighting in court to make the practice more secure as we work to re-elect President Donald J. Trump in November.”
Taking cues from Trump, Republican-led legislatures in states including Alabama, Florida and North Carolina want to roll back pandemic expansions of voting by mail that led to a record turnout in 2020. Some state legislatures have already shortened the time voters can request or return the ballots; limited the number of ballot drop boxes; or threatened to penalize people who drop off another voter’s absentee ballot.
Still, the overwhelming majority of states offer some form of early in-person voting. Twenty-eight states offer no-excuse absentee voting, where any voter can request and cast a ballot by mail. In another eight states and Washington, D.C., voters automatically receive a ballot by mail, according to a 2023 analysis by the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Trump, in nearly every rally or appearance, repeats his 2020 stolen-election claims, even after his own Justice Department concluded that there was no widespread fraud and his campaign and allies lost dozens of court cases challenging the results.
Democrats and other Trump critics have said the former president’s continued claims of election theft are grossly irresponsible and doing lasting damage to the U.S.
“Donald Trump is terrified of facing another humiliating defeat in November, so he is going to spend the next eight months spreading dangerous conspiracies about a rigged election and attempting to undermine our democracy, just like he did in 2020,” said Rosemary Boeglin, communications director for the Democratic National Committee. “Democrats will continue to fight for every voter’s right to make their voice heard—early, by mail, and in person on Election Day—free from intimidation, misinformation, or suppression.”
Two of the four criminal cases Trump is facing involve his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. That includes a federal prosecution in Washington, D.C., where he is facing allegations that he knowingly spread false claims of widespread election fraud that contributed to the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. A potential trial in that case is on hold while the Supreme Court considers Trump’s claims that he is immune from prosecution for actions he took while in office.
