Trump’s Unusual Strategy: ‘Our Main Priority Isn’t Voter Turnout

 Election Day 2024 is still 11 weeks away, which might seem like a long time, but early voting in some states begins in less than a month. Common sense suggests that the major party presidential nominees would be intensely focused on get-out-the-vote strategies and securing as many votes as possible. After all, in a democracy, the more votes a campaign garners, the better its chances of success.

Given this, it’s surprising to see Donald Trump consistently downplay the importance of securing votes in his Republican candidacy. According to usadailynews91 News:

Former President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that his strategy for the fall is less about mobilizing supporters to vote and more about ensuring that Democrats "don’t cheat" in the general election. “Our primary focus is not to get out the vote; it is to make sure they don’t cheat,” Trump remarked during a campaign event in Asheboro, North Carolina, a state that Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign considers competitive this year.

“We have all the votes we’ll need,” Trump added, citing yard signs as evidence of his popularity. A video clip of his comments made it clear that the former president was serious.

I’ve studied campaigns for quite some time, and I genuinely can’t recall another instance where a candidate, with less than a month before voters start casting ballots in a competitive race, publicly declared, “Our primary focus is not to get out the vote.”

If this message sounds familiar, it’s because it is. About a month ago, we discussed how the GOP candidate made a similar statement on Fox News in late July. “My instruction: We don’t need the votes, I have so many votes,” Trump said.

This wasn’t a one-time slip. The day after June’s presidential debate, Trump held a rally in Virginia, telling the crowd, “We don’t need votes.” Just a week earlier, at a far-right conference, he delivered a similar message. “I tell my people, I don’t need any votes,” Trump said, adding, “We don’t need the votes.”

This rhetoric was also evident during a Detroit appearance, where Trump told the audience, “Listen, we don’t need votes.” He reiterated, “We don’t need votes. We have to stop — focus, don’t worry about votes.”

As my MSNBC colleague Ja’han Jones pointed out, the former president has been pushing this narrative since last fall, during his party’s primary process. In October, Trump told a New Hampshire audience, “You don’t have to vote. Don’t worry about voting. The voting — we got plenty of votes.”

As far as I can tell, Trump isn’t literally telling Americans not to vote. Instead, he’s suggesting that his popularity is so overwhelming that securing support from voters will be effortless as Election Day approaches.

The real challenge, according to the former president, is combating cheating and electoral fraud—issues that exist only in his unfounded imagination, despite his inability to provide evidence for his conspiracy theories.

In other words, whenever Trump downplays the need for votes, he’s implicitly emphasizing the need for unnecessary voter intimidation tactics and voting restrictions. Given the frequency and repetition of his anti-election rhetoric—Trump even questioned earlier this week, “Why are we having an election?”—along with his longstanding hostility toward democracy, it’s hard not to find these comments deeply unsettling.