The Yuge Trump Election Self-Own

Trump trashed mail-in ballots and created deep mistrust over them. Now, it’s coming back to bite Republicans again.

Mail in ballots are seen at the Los Angeles County Registrar vote by mail operation center in City of Industry, California. Photo by Robyn BECK / AFP.

In the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election, Republican campaign officials were understandably nervous. Donald Trump had begun to call the fairness and validity of the upcoming election into doubt and to criticize something that millions of Republican voters, especially the older ones, had used for years: mail-in ballots.

By repeatedly suggesting that the election was rigged against him and that the processes weren’t safe for mail-in balloting, Trump caused Republican voters to choose to cast their votes on Election Day itself. 

This was a very risky strategy. Unlike Democrats, who could build up an early bank of votes through an organized and concerted ground game, Republicans had to hope their voters would show up and brave possible long wait times and perhaps even inclement weather.

It was those Democratic-heavy mail-in ballots that helped Joe Biden finally score victories in 2020 in states like Pennsylvania, albeit several days later as the mail-in ballots were counted. This process fueled further suspicion that Democrats were somehow cheating because the vote counts kept changing long after Election Night. But of course they did; there were still hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots to count, and they were heavily weighted in favor of the Democrats.

In 2024, the question of whether Trump will go after election integrity and mail-in ballots is again on the minds of GOP officials. Some are actively messaging to the MAGA base that they should ignore what Trump said last time—and continues to say today—about mail-in ballots and just trust the system to count them fairly this time around.

That message isn’t getting through very consistently.

So, do Republicans have a big mail-in ballot problem in 2024? In today’s piece I’ll take a look at the recent trends among Republican voters and see how large the problem appears to still be. Then I’ll look at what Trump is saying about it, and how that might frustrate the efforts of the GOP to change their voters’ minds about using the mail to vote. Finally, I’ll look at the court cases and legislation the GOP has filed or introduced around the country to try and restrict the use of mail-in ballots, given that their message is falling on deaf GOP ears and they now fear this could cost them electorally.

The still-apparent party divide over mail-in ballots

When it comes to mail-in and absentee ballots, Republicans have had their work cut out for them changing minds and voting behavior. A Pew Research Center analysis following the 2022 midterm elections showed that 58% of GOP voters were not confident that mail-in or absentee votes cast in those elections were counted correctly. By strong contrast, some 94% of Democrats expressed confidence in the counting.

Many in the GOP recognized the problem it had built for itself over mail-in ballots. In Virginia, the GOP governor, Glenn Youngkin, led a campaign called “Secure Your Vote” which sought to convince GOP voters to start using them regularly again.

“Vote early. Vote early. Vote early,” Youngkin told one small crowd gathered before his blue-and-red “Secure Your Vote Virginia” tour bus as he traveled the state ahead of the 2023 elections. “Folks, we don’t know if a child is going to get sick” on Election Day, he said. “We don’t know if something is going to happen at work.”

Youngkin spent millions of dollars and produced some success in turning Republican voting behavior around. According to DCist, a few days before the election,

About 41% of early votes were likely for Republicans, according to estimates from the Virginia Public Access Project. That’s about 2.3% more than last year and more than 3% compared to 2021. 

Still, that tick upward didn’t close the gap completely, even after Youngkin had gone all in with the campaign. Republicans narrowly lost both chambers of the legislature that year.

Last summer, the GOP national leadership had also begun a campaign called “Bank Your Vote.” It urged Republicans to act by voting early. “To beat Joe Biden and the Democrats in 2024, we must ensure that Republicans bank as many votes as possible before Election Day,” the national party urged. 

Republicans need to “feel comfortable” using mail-in ballots, the program declared, promising that the GOP “will be working hard to get our voters to vote by mail.” 

They even got high-profile Republicans to record a video message:

If you watch closely, even Donald Trump makes an appearance in it. “Go to bankyourvote.com and sign up to commit to voting early,” Trump says, though he doesn’t sound very enthusiastic.

One of the first big tests of this program was last month’s special election in NY-3 that was held to replace outgoing Congressman and soon to be federal inmate, George Santos. Democrats fielded Tom Suozzi, a familiar name who had held the seat before, and following the successful ground game playbook, amassed a sizable number of early votes. Democrats comprised some 48 percent of the total early votes versus just 34 percent for the Republicans, with undeclared voters making up 19 percent.

That meant that Republicans went into Election Day some 14 points down. And then, to their dismay, a big blizzard hit right on Election Day itself. Same day turnout plummeted. And the Republican candidate lost by eight percentage points, even though polls had claimed it was a dead heat.

The lower levels of early voting by Republicans, even in a relatively affluent and suburban district like NY-3, spell trouble for the GOP nationwide, especially among the MAGA faithful who are listening to Donald Trump for clues about how they should act.

Don’t listen to the orange man at the podium!

Trump may have recorded a video message for the GOP. And his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, as soon-to-be co-chair of the Republican National Committee, may have urged party faithful to change their ways on mail-in voting. But this might not prove enough, because keeping Trump on message with mail-in ballots while on the campaign trail hasn’t been easy.

The former president is known to extemporize, often going off-script and off-message in ways that his handlers and the party must scramble later to fix. Mail-in voting is a prime example.

As recently as February 20 of this year, Trump specifically warned an audience at a Fox News town hall about mail-in voting. Host Laura Ingraham of the Fox Network threw Trump a softball question on the matter. “Forget the past, how are you going to make sure we don’t have problems going forward?” she asked.

Trump didn’t understand the assignment, or else he forgot it completely. “You’re going to automatically have fraud,” he said, no doubt eliciting groans from party leadership even as the audience applauded. 

If you have it, you’re going to have fraud…. When you go into a voting place, in a properly run state, they look at you, you give voter ID, it would be very hard to cheat on a mass scale.

He then blasted the idea of “millions of ballots” coming in by mail in places like California, adding that “nobody knows where they’re coming from.” But when pressed about what he was actually going to do about it, Trump responded, “The way you win is by swamping them”—presumably on Election Day.

So much for banking the vote.

If you can’t beat ‘em, restrict ‘em

Perhaps because they know they have a baseline problem with their own voters, Republicans have gone on the attack in the courts and in the state legislatures to try to limit mail-in voting, a practice they once roundly championed. 

This has set up a strange contradiction. Out of one side of their mouths, Republicans are trying to convince voters that mail-in ballots are safe and secure. But out of the other side, they are going to court and passing laws to block things like no-excuse mail-in voting. 

As CNN reported,

Nearly two dozen states, including key 2024 Senate battlegrounds such as Ohio and Arizona, have enacted new restrictions on mail-in voting since the 2020 election, according to Voting Rights Lab, a group working to expand ballot access that’s tracking legislation at the state level.

Ohio shortened the time allowed to apply for an absentee ballot, while in Arizona, voters are now removed from the early voting list if they don’t vote at least once in two years. 

Take the New York election as another example. The RNC and the local Republican party had sued the state to try and block the Early Mail Voter Act, which permits voters to cast mail-in ballots during the early voting period without having to attest that they were going to be absent or otherwise could not vote in person because of illness or physical disability. The plaintiffs claimed it was unconstitutional to allow a new class of absentee voter beyond those enumerated in the state constitution. 

This lawsuit failed, but it sent an unmistakable message that Republicans were somehow still opposed to mail-in voting and would do everything to try and stop it, including suing to invalidate no-excuse mail-in ballots altogether. But why make such a big deal about mail-in ballots unless, deep down, you don’t trust the system?

The fact is, Republicans still don’t have their story straight on this, and their voters are confused. Their leaders want them to vote early, except that they also want all mail-in voting banned. Donald Trump says to bank your vote, but then he trashes mail-in balloting when he talks to audiences of voters.

In the end, this is a self-own of rather remarkable size and consequence. And Republicans still haven’t figured out how to undo the damage that sowing mistrust in the underlying system has inflicted upon their turnout numbers. If the 2024 election is a repeat of 2020 when it comes to mail-in balloting, that could give Democrats a winning boost in what are expected to be tight races, especially in the crucial battleground states.