Republicans should leave nothing to chance this election cycle and do whatever they have to do — including embracing a change of messaging and encouraging early voting, Republican National Committee Co-Chair Lara Trump said during an exclusive interview at Turning Point USA’s Young Women’s Leadership Summit in San Antonio, Texas.
Trump spoke to Breitbart News about some of the major changes made at the RNC ahead of this election, which kicked off with what she described as a “big staff change.”
“So that was sort of our initial first day operation and then since then we’ve gone through every vendor, every contract. We want to make sure we’re getting the best value for our dollar with everything,” she said, explaining that “election integrity” is the “highest and top priority” at the RNC.
“If you come to the RNC, the bulk of the people actually working in that building right now are on our election integrity team, and we have a huge push across the country. We’re going to have 100,000 volunteers for this election cycle, protectthevote.com, if anyone wants to come volunteer with us, and we were putting so many resources in that because we can never repeat 2020 in that election ever again. If we don’t have free, fair and transparent elections, quite frankly, nothing else really matters that we’re doing in this country. And so we really are doing things much differently,” she said, explaining that the RNC is changing its messaging and also looking at “legal ballot harvesting, which has never been done before.”
“We also want to encourage people. Our messaging is a little different on voting in the past. We know that traditionally, Republicans like to vote on election day. What we are asking this election cycle is for people to vote early,” she said, adding that Republicans should do so and then use their time from that day up until election day to talk to others “because we cannot leave this to chance.”
“Life happens. If you wait till election day, you never know. And so we want to make sure that people are hearing that message loud and clear,” she said, acknowledging that many Republicans are “naturally reluctant” to the message to vote early, because it goes against what they have heard consistently in previous elections. However, she said the RNC is doing everything it can to ensure election integrity so Republicans feel comfortable voting early.
“I understand why people feel that way. Look, what happened in 2020 with a lot of the mail in voting was awful, but we are working really hard right now to ensure that voter rolls are cleaned up across this country, that states that just mail out ballots are not sending them out to people who no longer live in those locations. We really are doing everything we possibly can to ensure that people feel comfortable doing that,” Trump said of the RNC’s efforts, highlighting Kari Lake’s past race in Arizona as what could go wrong.
“Look, you look at places like Arizona for example. Kari Lake likely would have won her election because we know the margin there was very, very slim. There was one polling location that went down on election day. People probably remember. It was in a Republican district. Lines around the block for people to get in and vote, and because that polling location went down, how many people didn’t ultimately go in and vote?” she asked, also pointing to an ice storm in Nevada which she said prevented some people from voting.
“We know life happens. And what we want people to understand is that going to vote early, your vote will count, and we need to make it too big to rig,” Trump said.
“If you get your vote in, you know it’s in there and then you can spend your time encouraging other people to go vote as well,” she added.