'Mixed message': GOP pours millions into early voting push Trump dismisses as 'stupid stuff'

A multi-million dollar effort urging Republican voters to cast their ballots before Election Day is being undermined by the top of the GOP ticket, Politico reports.

According to Politico, Republicans “have spent the better part of the last four years trying to undo” Donald Trump’s “vilification of mail and early voting method” — a crucial component of the former president’s “web of stolen-election conspiracy theories.” His anti-early voting rhetoric “comes as Republicans and GOP-aligned groups wage multimillion-dollar campaigns to get voters in key states to embrace those methods.”

Wisconsin GOP strategist Mark Graul told Politico Trump’s "silly" effort to undermine early voting “screws it up."

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“The whole idea behind absentee voting is you’re banking that vote, you’ve got that person, you know they’re going to vote for you, you get them off the list,” Graul told Politico. “This is how you get the extra 5,000, 10,000 votes that may decide the election.”

“It’s counterproductive,” former Trump campaign senior adviser David Urban said of Trump's anti-early voting rhetoric.

“We’re kind of pushing a message, and then the president comes and says, ‘I’m not so big on that,’ it’s much more difficult to convince people,” Urban said.

Erie County, PA GOP Chair Tom Eddy told the outlet, “for three years, I didn’t like [early voting]. But during those three years, we lost elections.”

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“You have to accept it in order to have a chance to win," Eddy told Politico. "And that’s what we’re doing. We’ve been pushing these things like crazy."

While the Republican National Committee joined with the Trump campaign to launch a “Swamp the Vote” program — an effort that includes tactics like broadcasting messages about early voting at the former president's rallies — “state data shows little improvement in mail voting rates among Republican voters,” Politico reports.

Meanwhile, “Trump has undermined Republicans’ — and even his own — messaging nearly every step of the way."

Per Politico:

In January, after winning the Iowa caucuses, Trump claimed mail ballots beget “crooked elections.” He called them “treacherous” during an event in Detroit in June. During an interview on Real America’s Voice in September, he claimed, without evidence, that the postal service would lose mail ballots either “purposefully” or through “incompetence,” and floated filing a lawsuit against the agency. And at a rally in western Pennsylvania late last month, Trump encouraged people to vote early, only to reverse course and call it “stupid stuff” moments later.

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Andy Reilly, the Republican national committeeman from Pennsylvania, told Politico Trump’s campaign “does send a mixed message” on early voting.

“But I’m confident in everything I’ve heard from the Trump team, and his campaign has said on numerous occasions that independents and Republicans and Democrats should feel safe in using the mail-in ballot,” Reilly insisted.

Read the full report at Politico.

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