Trump’s Attacks on Early Voting May Have Hurt Republicans in the Midterms

Ryan Teague Beckwith
·5 min read
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(Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump’s ongoing attacks on expanding access to voting hampered Republican turnout efforts in the midterm elections, potentially costing the GOP in key states like Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

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As Trump announced his third presidential campaign earlier this week, he finished with a promise to end the voting practices that were made more available during the pandemic, such as mail-in ballots and longer early voting periods, part of his false narrative that widespread fraud cost him re-election in 2020.

He said he would demand the US adopt “same-day voting,” in an effort to “do whatever it takes to bring back honesty, confidence, and trust in our elections.”

His disdain for early and mail voting trickled down to Republican candidates and voters, who focused more on Election Day voting. That left the GOP dramatically more reliant on supporters showing up on Election Day, while Democrats banked votes from their most stalwart supporters during early voting periods.

Nationally, Democrats voted by mail by nearly nine percentage points more than Republicans in the midterms, according to data from the 24 states that report party registration compiled by the US Elections Project. In Pennsylvania, where Democrats won crucial gubernatorial and Senate races, 69% of mail ballots came from Democrats, compared to just 21% from Republicans.

Jason Rose, a Republican strategist who worked for former sheriff Joe Arpaio in Arizona, called relying solely on Election Day voting “certifiably insane.”

“It’s like an NBA team saying we’re not going to play well in the first half, but we’re going to be so good in the second half that we’ll win the game,” he said. “If an NBA team adopted that strategy they’d be laughed out of the league.”

Before Trump’s “stop the steal” movement, vote-by-mail was not a partisan issue, and Republicans often fared better with it in some states, particularly rural areas where the party is stronger. But that changed in 2020, when Trump repeatedly attacked mail-in ballots, ballot drop boxes and even mail carriers.

Trump-backed candidates also attacked vote-by-mail as a policy. In Arizona, where more than 80% of voters regularly cast their ballots by mail, failed gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake called for ending the system and returning to “one-day voting.”

Those calls continued among some Republicans even after the election, amid frustration at slow ballot counting.

On Thursday, Texas Republican Chair Matt Rinaldi called for “one day voting,” even in a state with some of the most restrictive voting policies in the US. On Sunday, former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker tweeted that “elections should be held on one day,” with exceptions only for people who are homebound or in the military, although Walker has voted by mail himself a number of times.

The continued attacks have undermined Republican confidence in voting by mail. A Pew Research Center survey in mid-October found that just 37% of voters who back Republican candidates are confident that mail ballots will be counted accurately, compared to 88% of Democratic supporters. Among Trump supporters, that number dropped to 26%.

Trump’s claims about the 2020 election were repeatedly dismissed by his own top officials and even judges he appointed. White House Homeland Security advisor Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall said that her department was working to stop attacks to election infrastructure.

“That has been, thus far, from the evidence that we are seeing in this election cycle, successful. But we must remain ever vigilant,” she said during a program hosted at Bloomberg as part of the fifth annual 9/11 Memorial & Museum Summit on Security, presented by Fiserv.

But Republican strategists say that GOP voters’ impressions that problems exist leaves their campaigns fighting with one hand behind their back.

With their most reliable supporters’ votes already banked through early voting, Democrats were able to spend their remaining time and money in the final days of the campaign getting out the vote among swing voters and those who face obstacles getting to a polling place.

GOP campaigns were more vulnerable to the kinds of last-minute problems that crop up every election. In Nevada, a massive snowstorm made it hard for voters in the greater Reno area to get to the polls. In Luzerne County, Penn., polling places ran out of paper. And in Maricopa County, Ariz., problems with ballot tabulation machines led to delays in some polling places on Election Day and undermined confidence among Republican voters.

Maricopa officials told voters to put the ballots that couldn’t be scanned in a separate box to be tabulated later, which led to conspiracy theories flourishing online. Emily Ryan, a political strategist with Copper State Consulting in Phoenix, said some local Republicans echoed these claims, even telling voters to drive to different polling places to drop off their ballots, which she said was political malpractice.

“They’re suppressing their own vote,” she said.

Despite Trump’s advocacy, the chances are slim that states will return to a single day of voting.

After experimenting with early in-person voting and no-excuse vote-by-mail during the coronavirus pandemic, more states have expanded access since 2020. Only three states -- Alabama, Mississippi and New Hampshire -- will not offer either option in the next election. In November, voters in Connecticut approved a constitutional amendment to allow early voting, while Michigan voters passed an amendment to expand early voting and require the state pay for return postage and drop boxes for mail-in ballots.

And eight states -- California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont and Washington -- now conduct all-mail ballot elections.

Michael McDonald, who wrote a book on how voting worked in the 2020 elections, said that growing opposition to vote-by-mail among Republicans was closely tied to Trump’s attacks, and it will likely take years for party leaders to persuade them that it’s an acceptable option, unless Trump himself were to change his tune.

“The die-hard believers on this aren’t going to listen to anybody but Trump,” he said.

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