A large number of mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania have not been returned by voters who requested them, according to the latest numbers from the commonwealth on Tuesday.
The latest tally of mail-in ballots shows that 1,702,115 ballots requested by voters in Pennsylvania have not been returned with seven days remaining. That’s 42 percent of the 2,969,485 total mail-in ballots requested.
That leaves Democrats in a last-minute struggle to deliver on their push to get voters to submit their vote-by-mail ballots.
“A major problem for them is that a ballot request doesn’t translate into a vote cast until the person fills it out and sends it in,” Trump campaign director of communications Tim Murtaugh said in a call with Breitbart News and other reporters.
Of the mail-in ballots requested, Democrats lead with 63 percent while only 25 percent of the ballots were requested by Republicans.
The data from the US Election Project shows that 1.2 million Pennsylvania Democrats have returned mail-in ballots with a 62.6 percent return rate.
“While Democrats may in states have a lead in absentee and vote by mail ballots returned, it is not a significant lead,” Murtaugh said.
He noted that Democrats were no longer pressing their supporters to vote by mail.
“They have now realized that they put too many eggs in the vote-by-mail basket, and they are not hitting the marks they need,” he said.
Murtaugh said that Democrats’ early lobbying for vote-by-mail was only frightening their own voters away from voting in person.
Democrats face the challenge of chasing down 712,749 remaining ballots requested by their supporters, with just a week left to get those ballots returned.
Republicans face a similar problem, but the numbers are much lower. Of the 761,811 mail-in ballots requested by Republicans, only 406,494 ballots have yet to be returned.
The Trump campaign believes that the Biden campaign does not have the necessary infrastructure to get those ballots returned.
“In order to chase those ballot requests and turn them into ballots cast, you have to have a ground game,” Murtaugh said. “Joe Biden doesn’t have one.”
The Trump campaign is confident that Republicans will turn out in force on Election Day, touting the 200,000 new Republican voters registered in the commonwealth by the campaign since 2016.
“The president’s Election Day vote and his vote turnout will carry the day because the Democrats have not opened up a large enough lead,” Murtaugh said.
Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA) argued that many Pennsylvania Democrats would actually vote for Trump in 2020.
“I’m just wondering, why do people think that every one of those Democrats who mailed in that ballot voted for Biden?” he asked during the call.
Kelly noted that his family were Irish Catholic Democrats but that he saw more blue-collar “dye in the wool blue” Democrats flipping to vote for Trump.
“There are a tremendous number of generational Democrats who have decided that their party left them a long time ago,” he said.