An election worker prepares absentee ballots for the upcoming general election before they are mailed to voters, at Wake County Board of Elections headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, U.S. September 5, 2024. REUTERS/Jonathan Drake/File Photo
Republican Party operations all across the country are opting to embrace a voting policy so despised by President Donald Trump that he has pushed for it to be banned, and it all comes down to fears about midterm turnout.
Trump has long railed against mail-in voting, claiming without evidence that it is ripe with fraud and making it one of the recurring factors in his false claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged against him. As recently as this week, Trump called on Republican lawmakers in the Senate to abolish the filibuster so that a nationwide ban on the practice might be passed. By and large, the rest of the Republican Party has gone along with this over the years, but now, according to Politico, this is starting to change.
In Wisconsin, the state GOP "is preparing a full-court press of mailers, emails, phone banks, door knocks and digital ads" to convince its voters to get behind mail-in voting. State party Chair Brian Schimming told Politico that the GOP is ceding ground to Democrats by not pushing mail-in voting as a viable option, and it increasingly has little ground to spare as the 2026 midterms approach.
“Democrats have built a pretty massive structural advantage in early voting for a long, long time," Schimming explained. "And we just can’t keep going into election night 100,000 votes down and expect to make it up in 12 hours. Treating early voting as optional, or something Democrats do, is a losing gamble.”
The Pennsylvania Republican Party previously spent $16 million in 2024 to encourage members to use mail-in voting, and the party chair told Politico that a similar push is “a priority” for next year. Elsewhere, in Michigan's Monroe County, the local GOP conducted a social media campaign encouraging permanent absentee ballots for the 2025 off-year elections and plans a bigger push for 2026.
“We have to encourage people to embrace mail-in voting and early voting,” Pennsylvania GOP Chair Greg Rothman told Politico. “That has to be a priority for us in 2026.”
The need to encourage low-propensity voters will be even more needed in elections to come, Pennsylvania-based conservative activist Cliff Maloney told the outlet, as Trump will no longer be on the
“Without Trump on the ballot, the low-propensity problem is an epidemic... Republicans have to adapt or die,” Maloney explained. “The blessing here is that there’s a solution — and the solution is to actually put dollars, cents, time and energy into the same tactics that the left uses to target low-propensity voters.”
At the national level, the Republican National Committee, according to an anonymous source who spoke with Politico, "intends to build on the aggressive early mail and in-person voting campaign it ran successfully in 2024." The committee previously discouraged the method in 2020, despite the fact that mail-in voting would lower COVID-19 exposure risks, and Trump went on to lose his reelection bid that year.