A month after the 2022 midterms, which went far better than expected for Democratic candidates and incumbents, Politico reported that top Republican Party officials acknowledged that their base was “led astray with calls to reject early and absentee voting.”
In the months that followed, GOP leaders came to a rather obvious conclusion: They could combat the Democratic advantage on early and absentee voting by shifting their messaging, prioritizing new campaign strategies, and convincing the Republican base to reject the party’s original line.
As GOP officials are starting to realize, that’s far easier said than done. NBC News reported:
When Donald Trump held a rally last year in Erie County, an important area in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, the top Republican official there went one by one to the 11,000 people waiting in line to ask one question: Would you like to vote by mail? It did not go well.
A local party official told NBC News, “I tried to give them a mail-in ballot application, and could only get out about 300. Every one of them said either, ‘No, that’s not the right way to vote,’ or ‘Trump does not agree with it.’”
The report added that what transpired in northwestern Pennsylvania was emblematic of a larger GOP challenge: “[I]nterviews with nearly 20 Republican officials and voters across the country say there is lingering, and sometimes fierce, resistance to the idea” of postal balloting.
If GOP officials want to know who’s to blame for this, I’d recommend focusing attention on one specific culprit.
Donald Trump spent years condemning every election policy that makes it easier for Americans to cast ballots. We are, after all, talking about a former president who once wrote via social media, “YOU CAN NEVER HAVE FAIR & FREE ELECTIONS WITH MAIL-IN BALLOTS — NEVER, NEVER, NEVER.” (In case that was too subtle, one day later, the Republican re-published the missive, adding, “NEVER!”)
For a while, it seemed party officials who had the former president’s ear managed to nudge him in a more sensible direction. In February 2023, The Wall Street Journal reported, “After years of assailing early voting, Donald Trump is having a change of heart.” The article referenced a recent fundraising appeal Team Trump sent to donors, which said the Republicans’ path forward “is to MASTER the Democrats’ own game.”
A month later, the former president told attendees at the Conservative Political Action Conference that it was time for Republicans to “change our thinking” on early and mail-in voting.
In July 2023, Trump even filmed a video for the Republican National Committee in support of the party’s early voting initiative.
And then he switched back to his original position. “Mail-in voting is totally corrupt. Get that through your head,” Trump declared two months ago at an event in Michigan, stepping all over his party’s message. “It has to be. The votes. I mean, it has to be.” To the extent that reality has any bearing on the discussion, there’s nothing corrupt about mail-in voting, and the former president simply has no idea what he’s talking about. But for the Republican Party, Trump’s ignorance is only part of a larger problem: The GOP base actually believes the former president’s nonsense — more than it believes party officials promoting postal balloting — and the result is a Democratic advantage that appears likely to linger a bit longer. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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