If you can’t beat them, rejoin them.
Former President Donald Trump sent that message this week as he launched a “Swamp the Vote” campaign with the Republican National Committee urging voters to fully embrace the same early voting tools that he has spent years disparaging.
Mr. Trump says the early voting methods, which he frequently warned were ushering in widespread voter fraud, are now a shield against election scams.
“Republicans must win and we must use every available appropriate tool to beat the Democrats,” Mr. Trump said in a video posted on Truth Social Truth. “Whether you vote early, absentee, by mail or in person, we must swamp the radical Democrats with massive turnout.”
“Vote early,” Mr. Trump said. “If we swamp them, they can’t cheat.”
Mr. Trump and Republicans have been edging in this direction after crying foul over the proliferation of early voting in 2020 that came in response to the coronavirus.
SEE ALSO: Trump ups his new-look voting message: Cast ballots early
That disparagement of early voting laws was blamed for playing a role in depressing Republican turnout in the 2021 Senate runoff elections in Georgia, where Democrats declared victory, helping them seize control of the upper chamber.
Despite the losses, Mr. Trump and allied Republicans continued in the 2022 election to discourage the practice.
“You know, the mail-in ballots — or sometimes I will say things like the fake mail-in ballots, but I don’t want to say that because that’s so controversial — but the mail-in ballots are just not as good as being out there on Nov. 8,” Mr. Trump told supporters at a Mesa, Arizona rally weeks before the 2022 election.
Members of both parties and political analysts said the message put Republicans at a competitive disadvantage in states such as Arizona, where the party had embraced and dominated early voting for decades.
Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly went on to survive reelection in Arizona. Former television news anchor Kari Lake, a Republican who promoted Mr. Trump’s rigged elections and voting fraud claims, lost what was considered a winnable gubernatorial race against Democrat Katie Hobbs.
Less than two years later, Mr. Trump has switched gears as he looks to flip the script against Mr. Biden in battleground states, including Arizona, which the Democrat carried by less than 11,00 votes in 2020.
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Mr. Trump’s first stop after announcing the “Swamp the Vote” campaign plans will put him back in Phoenix Thursday for a “Chase the Vote” town hall sponsored by Turning Points Action.
Like Mr. Trump, the conservative group is fighting to persuade Republican voters to vote early after lambasting the system.
“It is going to be hard to put the genie back in the bottle,” said J. Charles “Chuck” Coughlin, who helped lead Arizona GOP Govs. Jan Brewer and John Fife Symington III to victories in 2015 and 1994.
Mr. Colgan said it is true that some states scrambled to establish new COVID-related voting rules in 2020, but that was not the case in Arizona, where roughly 80% of the electorate had grown accustomed to and happy with the popular no-excuses mail-in voting system that Republicans created in 1991.
“Only after the 2020 election did we start hearing about the problems with Trump and early voting, and we saw the effect of that in the next cycle,” said Mr. Colgan, who became an unaffiliated voter in 2017. “He has been told, I know, by all his political people that his arguments against early voting are hurting him.”
• Seth McLaughlin can be reached at smclaughlin@washingtontimes.com.