Ronna McDaniel, former chair of the Republican National Committee, called on her party to get behind early voting after President-elect Donald Trump’s election win.
“This has to be the norm going forward. We can’t expect to get everything on Election Day,” said McDaniel in an interview with NewsNation on Wednesday.
Nearly 86 million early votes were cast in this year’s presidential election, a figure that includes roughly 46.7 million in-person votes and about 39.4 million ballots returned by mail, according to the University of Florida Election Lab.
The turnout is notably down from a record set during the 2020 election when more than 100 million votes were cast in-person or by mail prior to Election Day.
A number of battleground states, however, saw record-breaking turnouts for early voting, The Hill reported.
McDaniel, who pushed false voter fraud claims following Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, called on Republicans in 2022 to stop opposing early voting after an anticipated red wave failed to occur in the midterms.
On Wednesday, she again signaled her support and offered praise for an early voting initiative that the RNC launched last year.
“This is certainly something that took an education, but it wouldn’t have happened without the top of the ticket saying it,” said McDaniel, who stepped down as RNC chair in March.
Trump has been a mixed bag on early voting, encouraging his supporters to consider the option this year despite his history of false claims and attempts to sow doubt about the practice. In 2022, he lied, “You can never have free & fair elections with a mail-in ballot.”
He claimed he would vote early in the presidential election this year but ended up voting on Election Day instead.
McDaniel, when asked Wednesday if Republicans and Trump have “learned their lesson” on early voting, said it was “so critical” for the president-elect to have spoken out.
“I mean, there’s no better person that’s going to get voters to change their habits, to believe in it than President Trump,” she said.
Trump again pushed falsehoods about voter fraud ahead of this year’s vote, laying the groundwork to cry foul if he lost. He and his election-denying allies have been quiet about the issue since it became clear he had won.
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