President Trump’s extreme opposition to mail-in ballots is more likely hurting him and down-ballot Republicans than it is helping him.
Mounting evidence in voter registration data, a survey, and organizer anecdotes shows that instead of preventing the voting method from being a major factor in the November election, his stance is turning Republican voters off from using the method entirely, which could have the effect of depressing Republican votes.
The president’s rampant alarmism on mail-in voting — most recently claiming that foreign governments will rig the election by printing millions of mail-in ballots, an idea rebuked by elections officials — frustrates those trying to push state election officials and Congress to provide ample absentee voting and in-person voting options and resources in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. They point out that many analyses find that mail-in voter fraud is small and often prosecuted.
“The ultimate choice for American citizens should not be ‘jeopardize my health, or vote?’” Tom Ridge, who was the first secretary of Homeland Security and former Republican governor of Pennsylvania, told the Washington Examiner. He now co-chairs voting rights-amid-a-pandemic organization VoteSafe with former Democratic Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm.
Republicans waging legal battles on mail-in voting worry that states do not have the infrastructure to make a quick switch to mail-in systems by November and that some states create an environment ripe for fraud when they allow people to request and return others’ votes with “ballot harvesting” or automatically send every voter a ballot, among other issues.
Trump’s amplification and distortion of those gripes, however, creates a different problem: As he blacklists mail-in voting, he discourages Republicans from using the method as Democrats organize around it.
“Mr. President: Your Republican incumbents and your Republican challengers in both the House and the Senate are going to do everything they can to maximize use of the absentee ballots to ensure their either election or reelection,” Ridge said. “It’s counter-intuitive, counterproductive.”
Emerging state figures on those who have requested mail-in or absentee ballots show a Democratic advantage.
Pennsylvania, which passed a law last year to allow voters to vote by mail for any reason, shows a similar trend. As of June 1, 1.9 million voters in the state requested mail-in ballots this year, and 71% of those voters are Democrats.
The Florida Democratic Party is flaunting that the party’s mail-in voter registration advantage is “cause for alarm at the Florida GOP headquarters.” A Tuesday memo from the party about state vote-by-mail enrollment data said since March 17, 350,000 Democratic voters enrolled in the program, compared to 160,000 for Republicans. That gives Democrats a lead of 302,000 vote-by-mail enrollments.
Some of the most striking evidence yet that Trump is impacting Republican voters’ vote-by-mail attitudes rests in a Rice University survey, obtained by the Washington Examiner, of 1,002 registered voters in Harris County, Texas — the most populous county in the state that has a larger portion.
The survey found that 68% of Democrats said they would be very likely to want to vote by mail, but only 42% of Republicans said the same. About 38% of Republicans said they would be very unlikely to vote with a mail-in ballot, compared to 14% of Democrats.
Bob Stein, a political science professor at Rice who conducted the survey, said that he noticed a difference between Republicans who answered earlier in the survey, which started on March 27, and the final result, which included all the answers through May 4.
Before Trump started vigorously attacking vote-by-mail, particularly in a notable White House briefing room press conference, about 46% or 47% of Republicans said that they would be very likely to vote by mail.
“So, it dropped 4, 5 points,” Stein told the Washington Examiner. “It was very clear to us that the polarization was great, but it got worse.”
Of the 38% of Republicans in the survey who said they were very unlikely to vote by mail, almost half had voted by mail in a past election. Their average age was 67: Old enough to be in the most at-risk group when it comes to the coronavirus pandemic and the age bracket that Republicans are counting on to vote.
“The president is doing something that is counter to what he wants to achieve,” Stein said regarding Trump’s complaints about mail-in voting. “The message they’re sending is, ‘don’t vote by mail, it’s unsavory, it’s associated with Democrats,'” even if that is not necessarily the intent.
The individuals in the survey could end up voting by mail anyway, or they could all end up voting in person at polling places. And the survey covered only a single county, not the whole state of Texas or the whole country.
But some voters are explicitly saying that they refuse to consider voting absentee because of Trump’s statements.
“We’re kind of listening to Trump on this,” Lee Snover, chairwoman of the Northampton County GOP in Pennsylvania, told the Philadelphia Inquirer last month. “He’s spoken about it. He’s tweeted about it. He doesn’t want us to do it,” she said, adding that multiple people have told her that “Trump doesn’t want us mailing in, [so] I’m not mailing it in.”
The risk for Republicans is what happens if in-person voting is complicated or hindered on Election Day, such as when mass numbers of polling places were closed this year in Georgia, Wisconsin, and Kentucky, causing some voters to leave. Or, if there is a resurgence of the virus, the voters who declined to obtain a mail-in ballot may decide not to vote in person and risk contracting the coronavirus.
“A lot of [Trump’s] loyal followers, I would dare say, for whatever reasons — disability, inconvenience, et cetera — [are] going to need to vote absentee,” Ridge said. “To discourage potential supporters from expressing their point of view, expressing their preference, it’s just, it’s contradictory to the outcome he wants to take.”
Sudden opposition to voting by mail marks a stark change for Republicans in states where voters are used to mail-in ballots.
After Florida started allowing no-fault absentee voting following the messy 2000 election, Republicans embraced mail-in voting and organized around it in order to win elections.
In Arizona, about 80% of voters receive ballots by mail because of being on the state’s permanent early voting list.
“Republicans have done a really good job over the last 10 years in encouraging early voting, in voters to the permanent early vote list,” said Jon Seaton, a Republican strategist at the Phoenix-based Camelback Strategy Group. In 2018 and 2016, he said, “We did really well with people who cast their ballots early.”
Trump’s public lashing out against mail-in voting may come too late. All of the six most important swing states have some form of mail-in or absentee voting.
Despite Trump, some state Republicans are doing what they can to organize mail-in votes. The Florida Republican Party sent an email in May to its supporters, reminding voters to request a vote-by-mail ballot. Pennsylvania’s GOP website includes instructions on how to vote absentee.
