Donald Trump May Lose Florida Due To His Attacks On Mail-In Voting, Former Republican Says
Former Rep. David Jolly appeared on MSNBC on Sunday and spoke about Donald Trump’s recent attacks on mail-in voting, which the U.S. leader says Democrats are promoting in order to rig the results of the November election in their favor, Raw Story reported.
“That’s a clear strategy of the president, to try to undermine the validity of an election that he is likely to lose,” Jolly said. “And I think he will deploy his lieutenants that hold governor mansions across the United States for voter suppression decisions as we saw in Georgia in the 2018 elections.”
Jolly then pointed to Trump’s attempts to “undermine the security” of vote-by-mail programs, which the former congressman called an “interesting gamble.” In particular, he noted that mail-in voting has high Republican support in states like Florida and suggested that the president’s recent strategy is causing this demographic to lose confidence in the process.
“There’s a chance he will lose Florida because of his attacks on mail-in voting,” the former congressman said, adding that the Republican Party is simultaneously trying to mobilize vote-by-mail in Florida and other states like Georgia.
“They want those mail-in votes to come in even while the president is saying they can’t be trusted,” he concluded the discussion.
Per CNN, three CNN/SSRS polls show Trump trailing Joe Biden in Florida, as well as in Arizona and Michigan. Notably, every Republican who has won the presidency in the last 96 years has done so with Florida.
As reported by USA Today, Rohn Bishop, the GOP county chairman in Fond du Lac County, Wisconsin, said that many Republicans in the region are worried about mail-in vote programs and expressed concern that Trump’s rhetoric is putting the party at a disadvantage.
According to Bishop, the president is “scaring his own voters” from using a legitimate way to cast their vote amid the coronavirus pandemic. This rhetoric, Bishop said, is not the “wisest way to go” amid his re-election campaign. The publication also noted that GOP state parties in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are breaking from Trump and pushing absentee voting as an alternative in the case that COVID-19 has not subsided by November.
As noted by USA Today, Trump and the GOP have attempted to distinguish between the security of absentee voting and universal mail-in voting, the latter which they suggest is susceptible to fraud. Interestingly, Trump cast his own vote in Florida using mail-in voting weeks before he attacked the process as corrupt back in April.
