In what is likely another attempt to distract from his many failings and broken promises, Donald Trump declared on his social media network that he is “going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS” and that he will do it unilaterally. He continued: WE WILL BEGIN THIS EFFORT, WHICH WILL BE STRONGLY […] The post Trump Demands: Ditch Vote-By-Mail. Republicans Shouldn’t appeared first on Washington Monthly.
In what is likely another attempt to distract from his many failings and broken promises, Donald Trump declared on his social media network that he is “going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS” and that he will do it unilaterally. He continued:
WE WILL BEGIN THIS EFFORT, WHICH WILL BE STRONGLY OPPOSED BY THE DEMOCRATS BECAUSE THEY CHEAT AT LEVELS NEVER SEEN BEFORE, by signing an EXECUTIVE ORDER to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections. Remember, the States are merely an “agent” for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.
In case anyone missed the point, on Monday, at the press conference for his high-stakes summit with Ukraine’s leader, he repeated his anti-mail-in ballot tirade as Volodymyr Zelensky looked on.
You will not be surprised to hear that the federal government does not manage America’s elections, and state and local elections officials need not do what the President tells them.
Nevertheless, Trump’s disparagement of vote-by-mail could prompt Republican governors and state legislators to pursue a fresh round of mail voting restrictions, and Republican political operatives to discourage mail voting among their rank and file.
Following Trump’s advice on mail-in balloting would be bad … for Republicans.
In the 2024 election, Republicans eased their unjustified opposition to mail balloting—Trump never abandoned it, but he softened his criticisms under pressure from party leaders—and it proved successful. The New York Times reported earlier in January:
Republicans made almost universal gains in mail voting during the 2024 election, eroding a key Democratic advantage in nearly every state that tracks party registration, according to a data analysis by The New York Times. The Republican rise in the use of mail voting was almost always accompanied by a drop in registered Democrats casting a mail ballot, allowing Republicans to make significant inroads in battleground states like Pennsylvania, red states like Florida and blue states like Connecticut.
In Pennsylvania, Republicans deployed a “multifaceted campaign of messaging, fund-raising and field operations,” boosting their share of the mail vote from 24 percent in 2020 to 33 percent in 2024. This proved critical. The Times reported:
Before Election Day, some Democrats speculated that the Republican gains in mail voting simply represented a shift in which high-frequency G.O.P. voters had decided to cast early ballots, “cannibalizing” the party’s Election Day vote. But Republicans’ overall turnout edge proved to be real, and their improved early-voting numbers gave their campaigns an advantage. “When we were looking at daily returns and saw huge gains in the Republican vote-by-mail share compared to previous election cycles, we knew we were on the right pathway to winning this election,” said Matt Gruda, who managed [Dave] McCormick’s [Senate] campaign. “We were seeing these gains not only among the most frequent voters but even more so also among the voters who rarely vote in our elections.”
And just because Pennsylvania Republicans were still the minority of mail voters doesn’t mean that’s true everywhere. The Times also noted:
In deep-red Oklahoma, Kansas, and Iowa, Republicans made up a majority of mail voters in last year’s election, after Democrats dominated in those states in 2020.
And in Arizona, a swing state where a vast majority of voters cast their ballots by mail, Republicans had an eight-point advantage over Democrats in mail voting.
That many Republicans out West had no hang-ups probably stems from the fact that mail-in voting got some of its biggest early boosts from Western Republican governors and secretaries of state.
None of this surprised me because I wrote in 2021 that the conventional wisdom, held by most major party leaders, that easier voting access inherently benefits Democrats, was clearly wrong. Republicans have won in states with high mail voting. Democrats have also won races in states with strict voter ID laws. And there is nothing about mail-in voting that is naturally more appealing to Democrats than Republicans.
Before 2020, voters regardless of party affiliation “tended to just take advantage of the process, whatever it was in a state,” including vote by mail and early voting, according to John C. Fortier, a resident scholar at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. So the partisan split about traditional and nontraditional voting methods that we saw [in the 2020 presidential election], fueled by Donald Trump’s disparagement of mail voting and polarization around the merits of social distancing, should not color our views about which party would benefit from Democratic proposals to nationalize and encourage such methods.
But now that Trump is back to full-throttle disparagement of mail voting, the gains Republicans made in 2024 may be reversed.
Trump’s MAGA movement includes many low-propensity, unreliable voters, often in rural areas. In future elections, Republicans won’t have their greatest motivator of low-propensity voters on the ballot: Trump himself. He will never be on the ballot again, no matter what MAGA leaders see in their fever dreams. In turn, Republicans should recognize it is in their interest to make it easier for people in far-flung rural areas to vote by mail at home, instead of forcing them to travel long distances in uncertain weather to vote in person.
But what is in the Republican Party’s long-term interest isn’t necessarily what is in Donald Trump’s short-term interest. And as far as I can tell, Trump perceives his short-term interest to be promoting conspiracy theories to justify power grabs. No Republican should feel obliged to indulge Trump’s self-serving paranoia.
The post Trump Demands: Ditch Vote-By-Mail. Republicans Shouldn’t appeared first on Washington Monthly.
