Just fine. South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott, the keynote speaker on the first night of the GOP convention, contradicted Trump Tuesday morning when he said on the "Today" show that mail-in voting isn't a problem.
While Trump keeps saying the only way he can be beaten is by fraud, Scott said he is "confident that we will have fair elections across this country."
"This process of mail-in ballots will work out just fine," he said.
That tracks with assurances from the postmaster general this week that ballots will be delivered on time by the USPS, although Democrats had harsh questions for him. The looming caveat is that people need to send ballots back as early as possible if they're voting by mail.
Where mail-in voting makes the Trump campaign most nervous. Trump's campaign manager Bill Stepien said Tuesday that universal mail-in voting, which Trump has questioned, is OK as long as this isn't the first year a state is using it.
"I think in the states in which mail-in voting has already occurred, that's fine by me," he said, adding it's been "proven over years."
"I think our concern in the campaign is when, you know, 80 days, 90 days out from Election Day, you have Democrat governors changing the rules, that is, that's a scary proposition. My concern is that Democrat governors like my old own state, Phil Murphy, he's making promises to the voters of New Jersey that he can't guarantee the he can keep."
That's Phil Murphy, governor of New Jersey, which switched to nearly all mail-in ballots this year. (The other jurisdictions that have also switched are California, Nevada, Vermont and the District of Columbia.) Trump has sparred with Murphy about the governor's order to conduct the election mostly by mail and his campaign has sued New Jersey. (Side note: New Jersey's two Republican congressmen voted with Democrats to increase funding for the USPS last week.)
Other states are doing things their own way, and often with input and help from Republican secretaries of state, although Nevada's Republican secretary of state has asked for extra scrutiny of mail-in ballots for the general election.
How to look at George Wallace today
George Wallace was born August 25, 1919. Some people say it's Richard Nixon, but Trump is the true political heir of Wallace, as historian Douglas Brinkley recently argued.
But Wallace wasn't a Republican. He was a Democrat.
The Democratic Party is all about diversity today, but it actually wasn't that long ago that White Democrats ruled the South and pushed for segregation. Wallace, the Democratic governor of Alabama, would have been 101 today. He died in 1998.
When he first became Alabama's governor in 1963, he promised, disgustingly, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."
He venerated the Confederacy and he worked hard to disrupt the Civil Rights movement, which Democrats in Washington were behind.
Wallace's appeal extended outside the South, however, even if he represented an old version of a Democratic Party that was fast changing.
He won states! He ran as an American Independent in 1968 and won five southern states. He's the last non-major-party candidate to win any votes in the #ElectoralCollege, which is why insurgent candidates these days try to change parties from within. He did that in 1972, back as a Democrat, pushing opposition to busing (ask Joe Biden about that).
Nearly assassinated. But he was shot by a madman who'd also tried to kill Nixon, paralyzed, and his campaign was cut short even as it was gaining steam. He spoke at the '72 Democratic convention from a wheelchair, however, and he still held power in 1976 when he ran again. So much power that when he finally endorsed Jimmy Carter, Carter flew to Montgomery to personally thank him.
Wallace grew to regret the racism he had once exploited, expressed remorse and tried to rehabilitate his image. He even went to John Lewis, asking forgiveness. And Lewis wrote a truly incredible New York Times essay about why Wallace should be forgiven.
"George Wallace should be remembered for his capacity to change," Lewis wrote. "And we are better as a nation because of our capacity to forgive and to acknowledge that our political leaders are human and largely a reflection of the social currents in the river of history."
It's hard to imagine that kind of grace today, when there is no forgiveness. But Wallace should also be remembered for tapping into White, working class frustration and anger, something better represented recently by Republicans than Wallace's Democrats. That's what Nixon took from Wallace with his silent majority. It's what Ronald Reagan took from him with his Reagan Democrats.
It's what Trump has taken from Wallace -- campaigns based in exploiting fears, promising to crack down on criminals, and other dog whistles to a racist populism that's won many US presidential elections. Trump's trying to use it now.
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