CHAPTER ONE to THE RETURN: TRUMP'S BIG 2024 COMEBACK by Dick Morris What Really Happened in 2020 To start our search, we must understand how the Democrats managed to turn out such a massive vote for one of the least electable people ever to run for president. So frail, senile, and demented was Joe Biden that Democratic strategists used the threat of the COVID virus to keep their candidate in his basement, behind a mask, shielded from public view. Nevertheless, the Democrats managed to win by expanding the size of the electorate. Both parties worked furiously to bring out their vote. President Trump won eleven million more votes in 2020 than he got in 2016. But Biden was elected because he got fifteen million more votes than Hillary did. The key change that impelled the huge rise in turnout was that the Democrats used the COVID virus pandemic to change the entire way elections are conducted. The excuse for the massive change from in-person voting to casting ballots in absentia, or by mail, was the fear that bringing more than 150 million people out to vote in person on one day might kindle massive increases in case rate and deaths from COVID. Even with the pandemic, roughly ninety million people chose to vote in person. If the dire warnings of Democrats were correct, we should have seen a spike in COVID deaths in the period immediately following Election Day. Didn't happen. The COVID spike never took place. Election Day was November 3, 2020. During the first week of November 2020, 7,287 people died of COVID. The COVID spike never took place. In the second week of November, 8,014 died. In the third week, 10,684 passed away, and in the last week of November, the death toll was 10,273. No huge spike. At worst, a slight increase in deaths, more likely attributable to colder weather as winter approached. If mail-in balloting didn't save a lot of lives, it sure fundamentally altered how people chose to vote, with almost half the electorate eschewing in-person voting. It opened the door wide to all kinds of mischief. No need to go to the polls--absentee ballots came delivered to your front door by mail, from Democratic secretaries of state, or brought there by young, eager, bushy-tailed Democrats who canvassed door-to-door. Where formerly, voters had to offer an excuse to vote absentee, now, under the new rules, none was needed. Why wait for Election Day? Most states permitted early voting. Some as early as in September. And of course, the earlier the votes could be cast, the more time to return to the homes and apartments of those who had not yet voted, to urge them to do so. Of the votes cast in 2020, 42 percent came by mail, including many through special drop boxes placed on street corners in especially Democratic areas. Drop boxes--serviced by party workers, not federal postal employees--showed an abnormally high proportion of Biden votes. The new rules required that we take on faith the eligibility and the identity of each voter. Where ballots were mailed in, no identification was necessary, and often signatures were not properly verified. As a predictable result, potentially mil-lions of people who had died or moved away were "voted for" by strangers. Even when the voters showed up in person, most swing states did not require photo IDs, so inspectors often had no idea who was really casting the ballot. In many states, ballots were "harvested" by party workers, collected en masse at events or by door-to-door canvassing, to be turned in later at the election offices. Sometimes votes for Trump did not make it through the process and never got turned in at the offices. Arizona passed a law--before the 2020 election--prohibiting ballot harvesting. Only a family member or caregiver could cast a ballot on a voter's behalf. Predictably, the Democrats sued, arguing that the law violated the Voting Rights Act. But in July 2021, the US Supreme Court upheld the statute, citing the possibility of fraud Writing for the 6-3 majority, Justice Samuel Alito quoted the bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform chaired by former president Jimmy Carter and former secretary of state James Baker. The Carter-Baker Commission noted that "absentee balloting is vulnerable to abuse in several ways: . . . Citizens who vote at home, at nursing homes, at the workplace, or in church are more susceptible to pressure, overt and subtle, or to intimidation (emphasis added)."1 It has long been true that Republicans--with their more educated, motivated, industrious, patriotic, literate, and active voters--get out their vote more easily. But Democrats depend on getting downscale voters--minorities, teenagers, and couch potatoes--to vote. Paper ballots were made for them. If you don't care enough to go out and vote, hey, just mail it in! The more apathetic, uninvolved, uninformed, low-motivation people who cast ballots, the greater the chances of a Democratic victory--a fact the Democrats knew well as they used the phony narrative of the COVID threat to induce mail-in voting. Can we win in 2022 and 2024? Sure we can. We must beat them under the new rules! Don't pin your hopes on rolling the clock back to the days of limited turnouts. Embrace the high-turnout elections--just be sure we win. After all, we Republicans have our share of couch potatoes, too! We don't need to cheat, or forge ballots, or help voters "cure" defective ballots. We can let the dead stay buried without casting votes in their names. Nor do we need to cast ballots in the names of those who have moved away. We only need to dig deeper and focus on those who support us but didn't vote--people who took prosperity and jobs for granted and figured Trump had it in the bag. We need to beat the Democrats by using the paper and absentee voting they pioneered in 2020. In 2020, about three in four absentee ballots were cast for Biden. In a pivotal state like Georgia, 80 percent of the paper ballots deposited in drop boxes (installed by Democrats and funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg) went for Biden. Let's turn that around! No longer can we sit back and wait for Election Day! We must beat them on mail-in ballots and absentee votes every day of early voting. For us, now, Election Day is every day in October, and in some states, in September, too. We have to scrounge for votes during the weeks and months before the election--as frantically as when the clock tells us the polls will close in two hours. But Let's Not Kid Ourselves . . . While ballot irregularities doubtless contributed to the Democratic victory in 2020, it was far from the whole story. Sure, there were many forged ballots cast in phony names, and many ballots that were altered by Democratic poll workers in the name of "curing" their defects. But the fact is, we ultimately lost because the Democrats got more legal, eligible voters to cast ballots than we did. We must not lazily claim that cheating cost us the election, and assume that if we fix it by new legislation or administrative reforms or better poll watchers, that will magically produce Republican victories in 2022 and 2024. Nor dare we retreat into a nihilistic cynicism and refuse to vote at all. We see now what are the consequences of Democratic control. Democrats won because they dug deeper to get votes by bringing ballots to their voters' front doors and collecting them--then and there--while we tried to get our people to go to the polls in person. As any pizza delivery boy will tell you, home delivery beats going out, every time. Paper ballots are here to stay, as are early voting and broader use of absentee ballots. We must adjust and win under the new rules. How Did the Democrats Do It? The Democrats won because: They persuaded Americans to vote by mail, not in person. They did not demand photo voter identification, and in some states, even barred inspectors from asking for it. They introduced no-excuse absentee voting. Anyone could vote without having to show up, or even to explain why they couldn't. They took advantage of laws allowing same-day registration to bring out millions of unregistered voters. Then they signed them up wholesale without checking identification, age, or residency. They made a mockery of voter registration--just show up and sign up. They used the court system to stop adequate verification of signatures on paper ballots, claiming that checking even obviously fraudulent signatures unfairly suppressed minority voting. They blocked efforts to trim from the rolls deceased voters and those who had moved out of state so they could fraudulently cast ballots in their names. They encouraged people to send in their ballots using special drop boxes erected only in Democratic neighborhoods. Instead of using the Post Office, votes deposited in these drop boxes backed Biden by better than three to one. The ballots from these boxes were collected and brought to the vote tabulators by Democratic Party workers. The boxes themselves were financed privately by Democratic donors such as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. They elected Democratic secretaries of state in key battle-ground states and used them to train inspectors to accept dubious paper ballots by the million. All the while, Republicans played by the old rules, pushing for in-person voting and relying on the electoral system to screen out illegal ballots. The Republican Party worked, with astonishing success, to bring out their vote to the polls while the Democrats went door-to-door to encourage people to stay home and cast absentee ballots. The Republicans worked their heads off, but home delivery--voting by paper ballots, at home--prevailed. Now we have to win by using the new rules. Excerpted from The Return: Trump's Big 2024 Comeback by Dick Morris All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.