Strategic Genius Undermines Own Campaign Again
How Trump's inane crusade against mail voting could hurt him.
“I think mail-in voting is horrible,” said Donald Trump at a White House press conference in April 2020. He himself votes by mail, he admitted, “Because I’m allowed to.” But for everyone else? “It’s corrupt.”
In 2024, Trump’s advisers know what the smarter ones among them knew then: Their candidate was undermining his own campaign with his weird insistence on discrediting mail-in voting, which is more firmly entrenched in American elections than ever. And he’s doing it again.
Right now there are a dozen factors pushing the election in Kamala Harris’s favor: She has more money, she has more enthusiasm among her voters, she has a better ground operation, she is a more disciplined and focused candidate, gas prices are low and going lower, etc. Each one of these variables may make only a small difference in the end, but they accumulate. And Trump’s inane crusade against mail voting — provided the USPS does its job (which is not guaranteed) — could be one more nudge in Harris’s direction.
Every once in a while Trump’s people get him to say the right thing; this spring, for instance, they prevailed upon him to cut a video in which he said “absentee voting, early voting and Election Day voting are all good options,” which led to headlines such as “Trump changes tone on mail-in ballots and other forms of early voting.” They even got Don Jr. to record an ad telling people in Pennsylvania to vote by mail. Because Trump is a moron, they had to work hard to convince him of what should have been obvious; as CBS News reported at the time, “One of the key factors in bringing Trump around on early and mail-in voting was the data advisers were able to show him that suggested the campaign could effectively broaden its outreach to swing voters in battleground states if the Republican base was comfortable with voting early.”
But before long Trump went right back to bad-mouthing vote by mail, and now he’s on the warpath. A week ago he claimed that 20% of Pennsylvania mail-in ballots are “fraudulent.” In a recent interview with Dr. Phil, he said mail-in voting “shouldn’t be allowed” because “any time you have a mail-in ballot, there’s going to be massive fraud.” And in an interview with right-wing nutbar Wayne Allyn Root, Trump said this:
We have very bad elections. We have a bad voting system. We have mail-in ballots. You know, it's very interesting. I read the other day that the Post Office is saying how bad it is. The Post Office is critiquing themselves, saying we're really in bad shape. We can't deliver the mail ... And I'm saying to myself, how can they be taking the vote - they are saying they're in very bad shape. That they cannot deliver the mail well. And we're relying on them. I said, you know, we ought to go to court and we ought to bring a lawsuit. Because they're going to lose hundreds of thousands of ballots, maybe purposely, or maybe just through incompetence.
Of course, the Postal Service has said nothing of the sort (more on that in a bit). As for Trump bringing a lawsuit, to do what? Outlaw mail voting entirely? There will probably be no such lawsuit, though I can’t rule it out entirely, because sometimes Trump tells his people “Let’s sue!” and they actually go ahead with it to placate him, no matter how stupid it is, though they know that his suit will wind up getting tossed out of court. I know this from personal experience.
There have been some lawsuits about specific aspects of mail-in voting, most of which Republicans have lost, but they won one significant (if temporary) victory, in which the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned a lower court ruling stating that ballots that arrive before election day should be counted even if they have missing or incorrect dates. The court ruled that the lower court lacked the proper jurisdiction; the case will probably return before election day to be decided on the merits.
In any case, I’d argue that Trump doesn’t really care much about mail ballots per se; he just wants to undermine faith in the integrity of the election system in every way possible, so he can claim upon losing that there was widespread fraud. That’s his goal, but it has an unintended consequence: discouraging Republicans from casting ballots by mail.
Easy, convenient voting is for Democrats
This is a problem for his campaign, because mail voting allows campaigns to bank votes in advance of the chaos of election day, thereby enabling resources to be shifted elsewhere. If a Trump supporter votes by mail a month in advance, the campaign can check him off their list and worry about mobilizing other voters whose participation is less certain. The more its voters cast their ballots by mail, the more efficient its turnout operation can be.
And the Trump campaign’s ground operation is already questionable at best; they essentially outsourced it to organizations including Turning Point USA that have no experience in running this kind of effort. Republican operatives are telling reporters it’s a mess; one told Semafor “they’ve seen ‘no ground activity at all’ and complained more typical volunteer work had been crowded out by ‘election integrity’ efforts.” In other words, they’re chasing phantom “voter fraud” more than they’re worrying about turning out people to vote.
If you ask Republicans, they insist that they still want people to avail themselves of any and all means of voting. But their efforts will have far less persuasive effect on Trump voters than what the man himself says, again and again. We saw that in the pandemic election of 2020, when there was a revolution not just in the number of people voting by mail — it more than doubled from four years before — but in who votes by mail. This striking graph is from the MIT Election Data + Science Lab:
Nevertheless, there is some research suggesting that in 2020, mail voting didn’t necessarily help Democrats overall; turnout went up everywhere, and most of the people who voted by mail would have voted in person otherwise. But that kind of analysis doesn’t capture whether campaigns were able to allocate their resources efficiently, whether they missed opportunities to mobilize infrequent voters, and whether the difference in their approaches to mail voting could have produced differences in the final vote count that are too small to achieve statistical significance but are very meaningful when some states were decided by just a few thousand votes.
There’s another factor at work as well: Mail voting depends on the Postal Service processing tens of millions of ballots in a timely fashion, especially given that thirty-two states require mail ballots to be received, not just postmarked, by election day. The National Association of Secretaries of State and the National Association of State Election Directors sent a letter last week expressing their concern that the USPS is not adequately prepared; the USPS says it will be able to handle the challenge.
But the fact remains that Trump’s constant harangues against mail voting do his campaign no favors. You never know what will happen on election day — there could be bad weather in key areas, for instance. If Democrats reach that day with millions more votes already banked, that gives them an advantage.
And this is symptomatic of a larger problem for Trump: He seems far less concerned with winning more votes than he is with creating uncertainty around the results so that after he loses he can claim he actually won. As long as that’s where his attention is focused, his defeat becomes more likely.
Trump knows he’s going to lose, and lose badly, so he is sowing the seeds of the next Jan.6.
Is this actually a "problem" for him? He shows no inclination to stop at anything other than seizure of the WH.