According to The New Republic, Donald Trump just unleashed a panicky string of posts here, here, here, and here, in which he frantically urged Republicans to vote by mail early. Amusingly, this comes after he told Republicans for months that mail-balloting is fraudulent to pass his SAVE Act.
Now that his efforts to nix vote-by-mail have flopped, he’s desperately begging Republicans to adopt it, effectively admitting his attacks on vote-by-mail have put a huge damper on GOP voting. Mail voting is an essential piece of pre-election-day voting, so his “fraud” nonsense very likely is discouraging GOP early voting. So what does the data say? To find out, we talked to Michael McDonald, who tracks the early vote at the UF Election Lab and on his Substack.
He explains why the numbers show Democrats and independents are far more energized than Republicans, what we can extrapolate from it about the election, and how Trump screwed himself badly on early-vote-by-mail. We also discuss the latest New York Times poll showing Democrats leading by 11 points and Trump at a new low, which suggests the bottom is falling out for him. Listen to this episode here.