Dem
51
GOP
49
The math seems pretty clear to us, even without input from the staff mathematician. If Party A is encouraging its voters to vote by mail or on Election Day, and Party B says voting by mail is a scam and that its voters should only vote on Election Day, then Party A has a very clear advantage. After all, things can happen on Election Day, from bad weather to long lines to car troubles. If Election Day is, in effect, Option B for a party's voters, then the odds that those voters' ballots will actually be cast are far better.
Needless to say, this is not just a hypothetical. Party A is the Democrats, and they have been trouncing Party B, the Republicans, in mail-in voting for the last 2+ years. It is not so easy for Republican candidates in purple states to wake up on Election Day knowing they are in hole, and hoping they can run up the score enough with the in-person voting in order to make up the difference.
In view of this, and in view of the borderline fiasco that the Republican Party went through last month, prominent Republicans up and down the line are calling for the Party to embrace mail-in balloting. That includes RNC Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel, as well as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). It includes some of the most prominent would-be 2024 presidential candidates, like Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and Nikki Haley. Much of the Fox crew, including Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, has fallen into line. So have many Republican talking heads, including Karl Rove and Kellyanne Conway.
The careful reader will notice one name missing from that list. Donald Trump continues to rail against mail-in voting, reiterating his opposition to the practice multiple times during the most recent election cycle. This despite the fact that the former president always casts his own ballot via mail. In any case, there are a lot of Republicans who believe whatever the Dear Leader tells them to believe. So, if the GOP muckety-mucks want to make real progress on this issue, they either have to be willing to challenge the former president directly (fat chance) or they have to somehow convince him to support mail-in voting.
There is a downside for the Republicans if they now support mail-in voting. Many of the voter-suppression techniques they use don't work with mail-in voting. For example, that old favorite of having one polling station for all of (Democratic) Milwaukee but also one polling station for every (Republican) rural village of 50 people doesn't work if people can mail their ballots in. Also, laws thay forbid people from providing food and drink to people standing on line for 6 hours don't work if you can fill out your ballot in your own kitchen and then drop it in any mailbox. In addition, rejecting absentee ballots for the smallest error (voter didn't dot the letter "i" in the signature on the envelope) will start to hit Republican votes as well. And then what about having Postmaster General Louis DeJoy try to ruin the postal system so the ballots don't arrive on time? Many of those ballots that miss the deadline may be Republican ballots. Hadn't counted on that. Oops. The one trick that still works is requiring the voter to provide a photocopy of a valid ID along with the absentee ballot, but Democrats can run ads, etc. to inform voters about this. The bottom line is that encouraging everyone to vote by mail may undermine some of the voter-suppression law the Republicans have been carefully designing of late.
That, in turn, raises the question of exactly where Trump's opposition to mail-in voting is coming from. It could be that someone—Stephen Miller, Jared Kushner, etc.—got to him and convinced him that mail-in voting means more people get to vote, and more people getting to vote means Democrats do better. If so, then Trump might be persuaded that's not true anymore, and to reverse his position on this subject.
However, we suspect that what was really going on here is that Trump suspected he was going to lose the 2020 election and he preemptively decided that mail-in voting would make an excellent scapegoat. Or maybe he just figured it out in real-time, as the returns rolled in. In any event, he remains obsessed with "stop the steal." And if he's decided that railing against mail-in voting is essential to peddling "stop the steal," he's never, ever going to change his position on the issue. (Z)