![]() ![]() ![]() If the election is close, Trump would have to wait just like the rest of the country for all the votes to roll in. That means there will likely be no basis in 2024 for a “red mirage” phenomenon, in which the Republican candidate will take a momentary lead based on a disproportionate share of the votes that happen to be counted first. And that’s largely what they did in the 2022 midterms clearly, the partisan “taint” of early voting has worn off. While Trump has never abandoned his effort to delegitimize non–Election Day voting, he (along with other leading Republicans) is now urging GOP voters to fully take advantage of the voting rules as they exist across the country. It reached a crescendo on Election Night 2020 when Trump claimed victory based on partial returns before mail ballots could be counted. ![]() This gambit arguably started way back in the wake of Trump’s 2016 victory, when he insisted on claiming he had won the national popular vote that he actually lost to Hillary Clinton by 2.8 million votes. Looking back at the attempted election coup that culminated in the violence of January 6, it’s obvious that Trump’s long-range strategy was to allege widespread Democratic voter fraud based on disputing the legitimacy of voting by mail and in-person early voting, while seizing on and publicizing every available rumor of chicanery by Democratic election officials. But his options for challenging the legitimacy of the next presidential race are increasingly limited. It follows, then, that if Trump loses again in November 2024, he is very likely to deny defeat once again. More important, Donald Trump has convinced a sizable majority of GOP voters to accept his unsubstantiated claims that the presidency was “stolen” from him in 2020. The front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination is a man who has never accepted his 2020 defeat. Photo: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images ![]()
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