Four months ago, President Donald Trump said his Republican Party would “do everything possible” to eliminate the use of postal balloting ahead of next year’s midterm elections and claimed he was starting a “movement” against the practice.
But with less than 11 months to go until voters cast ballots that will determine whether the GOP will keep control of Congress and 48 governors’ mansions for the remainder of his term, party leaders across the country are decidedly not on board with Trump’s opposition to voting by mail.
Republicans in the key battleground states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania are actually taking concrete steps to remind voters to take advantage of programs that allow them to cast ballots by mail, including through direct mail ads, email reminders, phone calls and home visits from volunteers, along with massive digital ad campaigns.
In the Keystone State, Republican leaders are doubling down on their successful 2024 work that used $16 million to urge voters to send in their ballots for Trump, who won the state’s electoral votes over Kamala Harris last year as a result.
And according to Politico, the GOP-aligned nonprofit Citizens Alliance is prepared to send volunteers to known on 750,000 voters’ doors to remind them to request absentee ballots.
The Republican National Committee is also reportedly working to follow up on 2024 mail-in voting advocacy after the success it had during Trump’s re-election campaign.
Wisconsin Republican Party chair Brian Schimming told Politico that his party can’t let the “pretty massive structural advantage” Democrats have built up over the years go unchallenged by simply relying on election-day turnout efforts.
“Treating early voting as optional, or something Democrats do, is a losing gamble,” he said.
The institutional Republican Party’s efforts to boost postal balloting are decidedly at odds with the views of the party’s leader, who has been crusading against the practice since his doomed 2020 campaign against his eventual successor-turned-predecessor, Joe Biden.
Many Republican activists who went along with Trump’s false claim to have won the 2020 election later conceded that Trump’s Covid-era warnings against mail-in voting depressed GOP turnout and led to what was at the time called a “red mirage” effect in which early returns based on in-person voting showed Trump ahead in key states before larger numbers of Democratic mail-in ballots were counted after polls closed on Election Day that year.
Five years later, Trump has used his return to the White House to continue his crusade against the practice.
In March, Trump signed an executive order purporting to ban states from counting ballots that are delivered after election day even if they are cast and postmarked beforehand, and the Supreme Court is now considering whether federal law can prohibit states from counting late-arrived but properly postmarked ballots.
Four months later during an Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump threatened to sign an executive order banning what he called “corrupt” postal balloting.
"We, as a Republican Party, are going to do everything possible that we get rid of mail-in ballots," he said.
He then falsely claimed that in Democratic-leaning states such as California, the practice is “so corrupt, where some people get five, six, seven ballots delivered to them."
Trump also suggested that banning the practice would prevent Democrats from being elected to public office in the future.
“If you [end] mail-in voting, you're not gonna have many Democrats get elected,” he said. “That's bigger than anything having to do with redistricting. And the Republicans have to get smart."
According to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, Trump’s 2024 win was made possible by nearly a third of ballots nationwide being cast by mail.
