Donald Trump’s renewed crusade against mail voting is once again threatening to undermine his party’s efforts.
Republicans poured tens of millions of dollars last year into convincing their voters that casting ballots by mail was safe after Trump spent years bashing the practice and baselessly insisting it was rife with fraud. And it worked, with GOP voters closing or even reversing the mail voting gap with Democrats in several states.
But now Trump is attacking mail voting again as he ratchets up his push to protect Republicans’ House majority in the midterms, scrambling a strategy Republicans effectively used to bank millions of votes in 2024. The president said Monday he wants to “lead a movement” to eliminate “corrupt” voting by mail ahead of the 2026 election and suggested he would sign an executive order to help do so. While he cannot unilaterally end mail voting — election laws are set at the state level — his renewed criticism could sow early seeds of doubt in the electoral process should the GOP lose in the midterms.
And it’s creating some whiplash for Republicans.
“I can see where he’d want to revert back to the way it was pre-Covid, since Covid is not an issue anymore,” Pennsylvania-based GOP consultant Josh Novotney said of Trump.
“But on the other hand, you have a lot of push towards evening the playing field with mail-in voting. Republicans did a great job of that,” Novotney said, adding that mail voting “really does help get out some Republicans sometimes that are lower-propensity [voters]. So I think overall, it was a positive for the party.”
Republicans made significant strides in 2024 toward closing what had been a Democratic advantage in mail voting four years prior, even as the overall share of voters casting ballots by mail fell 13 percentage points from 2020, when the pandemic changed voting habits.
In North Carolina, Republicans narrowly outpaced Democrats in mail ballots cast in 2024, a reversal from four years prior, when Democrats banked a more than 250,000-voter advantage among mail ballots. (Trump won the state both times.) Republicans similarly returned to their advantage among mail-in votes in Arizona, which has allowed any voter to request a mail ballot since the early 1990s.
And in Pennsylvania, state data shows GOP voters accounted for 32 percent of mail ballots in 2024, when Trump won the state, up from 25 percent in 2020, when he narrowly lost to Joe Biden.
That bump came after Republicans pumped $16 million into promoting mail voting in Pennsylvania, said Andy Reilly, one of the state’s representatives on the Republican National Committee and part of the team that pushed the practice to help elect GOP Sen. Dave McCormick over the Democratic incumbent, Bob Casey.
“Those were the rules of the game” in 2024 “and you had to play by the rules,” Reilly said.
But Reilly said he agrees with Trump that mail-in voting is “impossible to police for fraud” and would prefer a return to restricted absentee voting. He is, however, open to expanding early in-person voting. (Pennsylvania did not allow most voters to use mail ballots until 2020, and it has a form of limited in-person early voting.)
Trump has long attacked mail voting even as he has availed himself of the system, heaping baseless blame on it for his 2020 election loss and goading GOP voters into spurning them in subsequent elections. He continued to vilify mail voting through the 2024 election, even as Republicans launched expensive efforts to encourage their voters to take advantage of it — falsely claiming that 20 percent of mail ballots in Pennsylvania were “fraudulent” and suggesting that mail carriers would “lose hundreds of thousands of ballots, maybe purposefully.”
Now Trump is back to blasting mail voting as a “hoax” that begets “massive voter fraud” — and is also railing against voting machines — as he hunts for ways to protect Republicans heading into a midterm cycle that is historically bad for the party in power. After his Truth Social post Monday, the president urged Republicans to “get tough and stop it” and said he has lawyers crafting him an executive order on the subject while taking questions from reporters in the Oval Office with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“If you don’t have mail-in voting, you’re not going to have many Democrats get elected. That’s bigger than anything having to do with redistricting, believe me,” Trump said. “Republicans have to get smart.”
Republicans such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk were quick on Monday to amplify Trump’s renewed offensive on mail voting — and his unfounded claims of fraud.
It has never been clear that offering mail voting sways election outcomes, as voters who cast mail ballots may have voted other ways. States that have expanded access to early or mail voting have seen no obvious benefit for either party. But party operatives generally like to get their voters to cast ballots early because it frees up resources for them to focus on the voters that remain.
Trump also has no power to simply end mail voting. The Constitution gives states the power to set the “times, places and manner” for federal elections and stipulates that only Congress can override state election laws. Any executive order Trump signs to change how votes are cast would likely be met with legal challenges.
Still, his scaremongering alone could sway his base away from the practice and erase Republicans’ gains.
Voting by mail “historically has been an advantage for Republicans” in Arizona and is a “safe and secure way to vote and has been for a generation in Arizona,” said Barrett Marson, a longtime GOP consultant in the state.
But “the president has sown distrust in the early balloting and mail-in ballot process, and Democrats have stepped up their game on the early voting efforts,” Marson said. “And that’s not good.”
Reilly, the RNC committeeman from Pennsylvania, acknowledged it could be “confusing” for voters to “have party officials telling you to use [mail voting] and then calling for it to be eliminated,” but he downplayed any concern.
“Voters are smart,” he said.
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