Dave McCormick warns Trump’s attacks on voting by mail are hurting his campaign
Former President Donald Trump continues to spread false claims about early voting and election integrity.
Pennsylvania Republican U.S. Senate candidate Dave McCormick gave his endorsement to former President Donald Trump’s campaign for reelection on March 6, tweeting, “I’m excited to work with the President and his team to retire Biden and Bob Casey and get our country back on track!” But according to a new Politico report, McCormick complained on a March 27 call that Trump’s repeated claims that early voting is inherently fraudulent are undermining his own efforts.
According to a recording obtained by the outlet, McCormick told other Pennsylvania GOP congressional campaigns that his team is trying to get Trump to stop attacking early voting.
“I believe that the president, at least people that I know that have talked to President Trump that is, is on board with it, too,” McCormick said of a Republican Party effort to make a dent in the Democratic Party’s recent advantage with voters who cast their ballots before Election Day. “But every now and then he’ll get asked about it, like he did on Laura Ingraham a couple of weeks ago, and he’ll say, ‘I don’t trust those mail-in ballots.’ And it’s really hard to get our people to apply for the mail-in ballots if the guy at the top of the ticket — so to make this work, he’s gonna have to come out [in favor of mail-in voting].”
McCormick also seemed to suggest that Trump’s lies about election integrity, which include baseless claims that President Joe Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 presidential election, are discouraging Republicans from participating in elections at all. “However big you think the problem is, our voters think it’s a big problem,” McCormick said on the call. “And so if our voters think it’s a big problem, and they’re not going to vote because they don’t trust the elections, we’ve got a problem. So this is a big deal.”
Though Trump and Pennsylvania Republicans have fought to restrict voting by mail, McCormick, federal and state Republican elected officials, and the Republican National Committee jointly announced in October 2023 that they were launching “Pennsylvania Bank Your Vote,” an effort to get Republicans in the commonwealth to cast votes before Election Day.
“Together with the RNC and the PAGOP, we will ensure that Pennsylvania voters know how to express their right to vote early so that we can end the weak and failed leadership of Bob Casey and Joe Biden once and for all,” McCormick said in the announcement press release.
Trump recorded a video for the national party endorsing the bank-your-vote effort in July 2023, telling supporters: “We must defeat the far left at their own game, or our country will never recover from this disastrous crooked Biden administration. Sign up at bankyourvote.com now and join the Republican effort to win big in 2024.”
But two days later, Trump said in an interview with right-wing radio host Jeff Fredericks: “We should have one-day voting, we should have paper ballots, and we should have voter ID, and you’d have honest elections. And that’s what we should have. When you see these votes when they take 42 days and they have ballots sitting all over the place, it’s a disgrace. We’re like a third-world nation.”
As McCormick noted, Trump told Fox News host Laura Ingraham during a Feb. 20 televised town hall event, “If you have mail-in voting, you automatically have fraud.”
Trump has repeatedly claimed without evidence that Philadelphia, which leans heavily Democratic, is a haven for rampant voter fraud, and that he was the real victor in Pennsylvania in 2020 rather than Biden, who won in the commonwealth by more than 80,000 votes.
Recent polls have shown McCormick to be trailing incumbent Democratic Sen. Bob Casey by between five and 10 points.
