Pa. Republicans are pushing mail-in voting for 2024, but Trump-fueled skepticism remains in the party

(News illustration by Natasha Vicens/PublicSource) The 2024 presidential election in Pennsylvania, a critical swing state, could come down to whether the Republican Party can execute a drastic shift in strategy from four years ago.Local and national Republican leaders are trying to get their party base to vote by mail in advance of the Nov. 5 Election Day — a remarkable change from recent years when former President Donald Trump and other prominent figures disparaged mail balloting, using false claims of fraud to encourage supporters to vote on Election Day only.Republican usage of mail-in voting in Pennsylvania has stayed consistently low since 2020, including in last month’s primaries, and some officials say they hear persistent skepticism of the voting method from voters.The result of the rhetoric pushed by Trump ahead of his unsuccessful 2020 re-election bid, and repeated at times this year, was Democrats dominating vote-by-mail results, essentially giving the party a significant head start in voting.Republicans ceding the mail vote to Democrats is like “running a 100-yard race against someone and giving them a 50-yard head start,” said Sam DeMarco, the chair of the Republican Committee of Allegheny County.In each election since universal mail-in voting was legalized in Pennsylvania in...