Trump tells supporters to vote early even as he still criticizes the practice

[Thiệu Ngô]

Donald Trump urged voters Monday in Pennsylvania to vote early in the crucial swing state. Then, he quickly reversed course.

By Lisa Kashinsky

Early voting, the former president said, is “stupid” — even if it might help him as polls show him in a close race with Vice President Kamala Harris.

“We’re here today because early voting begins in Pennsylvania over the next two weeks, and we need each and every one of you to go out,” he told the crowd in Indiana, Penn. “Just don’t take anything for granted.”

Trump’s contradictory statements about what has become a common method of voting throughout the U.S. — and now embraced by many Republicans — reflects his hatred of a practice he says is vulnerable to fraud and helped cost him the 2020 election.

Minutes after urging people to vote early, he repeated his baseless claims of fraud in the 2020 election to several thousand supporters.

“What happened the last time was disgraceful,” he said.

Trump, never one to stick strictly to the talking points on his teleprompter, has increasingly sown doubts on the validity of mail-in and early voting as Election Day nears, raising questions about the United States Postal Service’s ability to handle a large volume of mail ballots and generally ratcheting up his rhetoric around potential election fraud.

But Trump’s ongoing disdain for early voting has not dissuaded his campaign and the Republican National Committee from actively encouraging voters to cast their ballots before Election Day. His running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), has promoted early voting in his campaign appearances. So, too, has RNC Chair Michael Whatley, as he travels the country recruiting poll monitors and workers as part of the party’s “Protect Your Vote” tour.

“We have got three ways to vote now: Early voting, vote by mail and voting on Election Day. And look, I am a firm believer that we ought to have Election Day in this country and not election season, but we are where we are,” Vance said at a campaign event in North Carolina earlier Monday. “So we’ve got to take advantage of all these pathways to vote.”

Trump’s campaign and the RNC even launched an online tool in late August to help Pennsylvania voters request mail-in ballots — and promised it would make the process “more secure than ever.”

Polling averages show a tight race between Trump and Harris in the critical swing state that helped usher him to the White House in 2016 but that he lost in 2020.

“We have to win Pennsylvania,” the former president declared Monday night. But, ever one to undercut his own messaging, Trump later suggested he could win back the White House without the crucial swing state — so long as he carries blue-leaning Virginia, which his campaign does not consider among the core battleground states and where polling averages put Trump behind his Democratic rival.