After Significant Gains with Blacks and Latinos in 2020, Trump and GOP Look to Expand Base Into America’s Deceased
Washington, D.C. Nov. 11, 2020
Donald Trump’s campaign team announced in a press conference this morning that Republicans would be looking to build on their unprecedented gains with the African American and Latino communities in the 2020 election by targeting the Deceased in upcoming elections. “Dead Americans have been overlooked by Republicans for too long,” the unexpectedly ebullient President tweeted ahead of the presser. “NO MORE! Great recovery coming. Dead people will love it. Nobody loves recovery like dead people!”
Many
pundits have pointed to the President’s poor showing among dead voters as one
of the key factors in his apparent loss to Joe Biden. Biden took home over 95%
of the deceased vote, racking up particularly large margins among that
demographic in the critically important states of Pennsylvania, Nevada, and
Michigan. Though White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany was quick to
insist that the results of the election are still pending both finished state counts
and litigation, she did vaguely allude to the fact that the President didn’t do
enough during his first term to win over the dead vote. “This President did
more for African-Americans and Latinos in four years than his opponent did in
forty-seven,” she said. “And they rewarded him for it at the ballot box. This
administration will give the same attention to the deceased in his second term,
and I think you will see similar shifts in the electorate. For the first time
in the nation’s history, dead people will be voting Republican.”
McEnany did take a not-so-veiled shot at Biden when asked why she thought the former Vice President did so well with the nation’s dead voters. “Look, dead people identify with Joe,” she said. “And why wouldn’t they? The Vice President is himself legally dead in most of the upper Midwest.”
That claim was quickly fact-checked as false by CNN. Correspondent Jim Acosta reported, “Our team has looked into this. Though many states do encourage the deceased to vote, a person must be alive to be on the ballot in all fifty states.” A Biden campaign spokesperson also denied that there was any truth to the rumor that the former Vice President had stayed in his basement during the campaign in a gambit to appeal to deceased voters by appearing to be dead himself. “The President Elect self-identifies as living,” she said, “just as he has for the entirety of his career in Washington.”
Whatever the reasons for Biden’s success with dead
voters, the President and his party have realized that, especially in light of
mail-in voting, the deceased are a growing demographic that they can no longer
afford to ignore. “If we don’t start to do better with dead people, we’re
finished as a political party in this nation,” said a Republican strategist,
speaking on the condition of anonymity. “It’s a rapidly growing voting block,
and we simply have to find a way to do better,” he continued. He pointed out
that a key difficulty in persuading the deceased community is related to
finding them. “They’re a demographic our grass roots just haven’t been able to
reach. It’s like people go underground when they die, and you have no way to get
to them. If you can’t find 
them,
you can’t persuade them.” What is more, the dead apparently don’t bother to
change their registration when they pass. They just change their voting habits.
“It’s frustrating,” the strategist complained. “A guy votes Republican his
whole life. Then he dies, and boom. He’s a Democrat. Not a registered Democrat,
mind you. He’s still on the rolls as an ‘R’, so we don’t even know about the
defection until after he’s voted!” Asked about how many new voters join the
ranks of deceased Democrats every election, the source said, “I don’t know. A
million or so every couple years?”
Despite the difficulties, the Trump White House is
undeterred in their optimism about winning over the dead. “Just watch what
happens in the Georgia run-offs,” Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said, referring
to the upcoming Senate elections in the state, which will be a test for the
GOP’s new strategy of targeting the dead. “People thought we couldn’t make
inroads with the black and Latino communities, either. And we did. The dead are
next.” 
