Trump’s assault on mail voting threatens his
reelection bid
The president's comments have made his base
distrustful of mail voting ahead of an election that may hinge on turnout by
mail.
Donald Trump’s all-out war on mail voting is
backfiring in battleground states.
By
CHRISTOPHER CADELAGO and ZACH MONTELLARO
08/03/2020
05:30 PM EDT
New private
polling shared first with POLITICO showed that Republicans have become
overwhelmingly concerned about mail balloting, which Trump has claimed without
evidence, will lead to widespread voter fraud. A potentially decisive slice of
Trump’s battleground-state base — 15 percent of Trump voters in Florida, 12
percent in Pennsylvania and 10 percent in Michigan — said that getting a ballot
in the mail would make them less likely to vote in November.
Trump won
each of those states by a thin margin in 2016, and less than 1 percent of Joe
Biden voters said getting a ballot mailed to them would make them less likely
to vote. Overall, 53 percent of voters in Florida and about half in Michigan
and Pennsylvania expressed health concerns about casting their ballots in
person and prefer voting by mail in November.
The poll is
part of a late flurry of research trying to gauge swing-state voter attitudes
as the coronavirus accelerates the trend of more and more voters casting their
ballots by mail. While there are concerns that the U.S. Postal Service may not
be able to handle the crush of ballots, some Republicans fear that Trump’s
regular fulminations against mail voting will depress GOP turnout in the fall.
He has repeated baseless claims of widespread fraud associated with mail
voting, and late last week the president floated the idea of delaying the
election because of it, which he does not have the constitutional authority to
do.
“He’s
sowing the seeds of his own downfall with his rhetoric around vote by mail,” said
Katie Merrill, a Democratic strategist whose consulting firm, Baughman Merrill,
commissioned the polling by FM3 Research, a respected outfit that polls for a
range of clients including Democratic campaigns and municipal governments. “It
really was like President Trump looked at the crosstabs of our poll when he
tweeted. He tweeted exactly to his base what they are thinking.”
Large
majorities of swing-state voters expressed concerns about their health, with 70
percent viewing the pandemic as an “extremely” or “very serious” problem.
Trump’s supporters skew older than Biden’s, including people who believe their
health is at risk. Because of this, pollster Dave Metz said it’s more likely
the president’s supporters will shy away from going to the polls in person,
particularly if state and local health officials issue warnings against doing
so.
“He
probably has more to lose in that scenario,” Metz said of Trump.
Mail
voting, which has been around for decades, had traditionally been viewed as a
non-ideological issue in several states.
“I think
when he talks about an 80 percent issue, where 80 people of the people are [for
expanded vote by mail], of course it's gonna hurt Republicans down the ballot,”
said former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld, who unsuccessfully challenged Trump
for the Republican presidential nomination and has since voiced support for
Biden. Weld wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post begging Republicans to ignore
the president on mail voting.
Conservative
campaign operatives have also worried that the president’s dismissal of the
method will hurt their programs to encourage voters to take advantage of the
option, allowing Democrats to build up a big lead. There’s early signs that is
coming to pass: In Florida, 302,000 more Democrats have enrolled in the state’s
vote-by-mail program than Republicans.
And if
nothing else, Republicans should embrace mail-in voting for their own political
futures, argued Kevin Kosar, vice president of research partnerships at the
free-market think tank R Street. “There's no obvious Plan B, other than being
able to receive ballots via mail and either drop them by mail or return them to
drop boxes.”
Despite
frequent criticism from Trump, 85 percent of voters in the three swing states
view the Postal Service favorably, the polls found.
Merrill and
Metz told POLITICO they conducted the three surveys to get a sense of the
landscape around mail balloting because the country is in uncharted territory
with the pandemic. But they also want to help set realistic expectations around
the timing of election results, including anticipated post-Election Day
reporting delays associated with mail vote counting.
On the
question of timing, the poll found massive gulfs between the two parties in the
three states. Biden voters by 93 percent to 4 percent say they are willing to
wait for delayed results if it means more people could vote by mail. Trump
voters said they want the results as soon as possible, 75 percent to 13
percent, according to the survey.
Undecided
voters’ attitudes more closely mirrored Biden supporters. Sixty percent of them
said they were OK with waiting for results, versus 24 percent who said they
wanted immediate results.
The poll
was conducted from June 30-July 20 with an online sample of 2,596 likely voters
drawn from voter registration files. The margin of error is plus or minus 1.9
percent.
All three
states polled allow for no-excuse absentee voting, meaning any voter can
request an absentee ballot, regardless of their age, health or where they’ll
physically be in their county on Election Day.
None of the
states have what’s typically referred to as universal vote-by-mail, in which
all registered voters are mailed a ballot, regardless of if they requested one
or not. Only five states — Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington — do
so as a regular practice. Two more states — California and Vermont, along with
Washington, D.C. — have announced plans to mail ballots to voters due to the
pandemic.
Most states
in America offer no-excuse absentee voting. Ahead of the November election, 42
states and the District of Columbia will, at a minimum, effectively allow for
no-excuse absentee voting. The vast majority of Americans will have a mail-in
option available to them, should they choose to use it.
Election
experts also say that the term vote-by-mail can be a misnomer for voters.
Voters often have the option to return their ballots at a drop box or to their
clerk, instead of through the Postal Service, and in-person voting options are
also usually offered even in municipalities that mail all voters a ballot.
And this
year, amid the coronavirus, more states are making it easier to request ballots
than they have in the past.
In late
May, for example, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat,
announced she would mail request forms for ballots to all voters in the state
for the November election. Trump was furious about Benson’s decision and
threatened to cut federal funding for the state, though he did not follow
through.
Democrats
in the FM3 Research poll were far more likely to say receiving a ballot in the
mail would make them more likely to vote, 53 percent compared with 21 percent
of Republicans. Some 35 percent of independents would be more likely, it found.
“If you
can't think about it for the greater good, at least think about it for your own
political survival,” said Kosar, the think tank researcher. “Because having a
Wisconsin-type mess, having people have to stand in line, having you — the
people’s representatives — blamed for a sudden spike in Covid cases. … Do you
want any of that on you as an elected official?
“I would
hope not. Because that’s what’s going to happen,” he added. “There will
be retribution for badly run elections.”
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