If Republicans hope to limit the damage in the midterm elections, they need their most die-hard voters to cast ballots.
The problem: President Donald Trump has spent years persuading them to distrust one of the best ways to make sure that happens — voting by mail.
With Democrats showing greater enthusiasm and races unexpectedly tight in reliably Republican states, the GOP needs to bank as many votes as possible from its base.
That may be why Trump took to Truth Social over the weekend to urge voters to cast ballots early, including by mail.
“Vote early,” Trump said in a video. “Vote by mail or vote in person on Election Day, November 3rd, so we can defeat the radical left Dumocrats in a midterm victory that is too big to rig.”
Banking votes cannot solve an enthusiasm gap on its own. But it gives a campaign more time to narrow one. Once the most reliable supporters have cast a ballot, field operatives can focus their dwindling resources on the less certain voters.
A partisan divided on voting by mail didn’t appear until 2020.
But Trump has made that harder for Republican campaigns. Before the pandemic, Democrats and Republicans viewed voting by mail roughly the same. A partisan divide didn’t appear until the spring of 2020, when he started raising doubts which rapidly widened into a persistent partisan gap, according to research published in PNAS.
A recent NPR/PBS News/Marist poll found that 70% of Republicans said voting by mail involves at least a good amount of fraud, compared with 18% of Democrats. An NBC News poll, meanwhile, found that Republicans were less likely than Democrats to say they planned to vote by mail in the midterms, 16% to 23%.
The contradiction is more striking because voting by mail remains such a routine part of American elections. It accounted for 30.3% of turnout in 2024, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission — down from its pandemic peak, but still above the pre-2020 levels.
Trump has escalated his attacks on the practice in his second term through both rhetoric and policy. In March, he signed an executive order that sought to create a nationwide citizenship database and make the U.S. Postal Service check it before delivering ballots.
The plan would also have required states to redesign ballot envelopes, use federal barcodes and upload voter information to a new federal portal, effectively federalizing a large part of election administration that is left to the states under the Constitution.
Election officials warned that the policy could create chaos and wrongly keep eligible voters from receiving ballots. Officials in several states told MS NOW that the administration’s push to identify alleged noncitizen voters risked sweeping eligible Americans off the rolls.
A federal judge blocked the rules, and the administration appealed to the Supreme Court weeks before the midterms. The court denied the government’s emergency request, leaving existing mail voting procedures in place for November.
An anonymous federal employee had already warned in a whistleblower disclosure that the new system was being built in a “sloppy and rushed manner.” The employee said a single failed barcode scan could cause a bulk mailing of 10,000 ballots to be rejected and returned to the state.
Trump’s initial response to the court ruling was not to reassure voters. In a Sept. 15 Truth Social post, he called mail voting “totally CORRUPT” and a “Nation Destroying SCAM.”
Now, he is asking Republicans to use it anyway.
Nora McKee contributed to this report.
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