Mail-in voting has lately emerged as the bête noire and whipping boy of the Trump 2020 re-election campaign, with the president extolling its vices every chance he gets, in person and in increasingly unhinged, exclamation-point-laden tweets.
President* Donald Trump has thus connected at least some of his re-election hopes to the wagon of mail-in voter suppression. But a look at opinion polls going back months shows a public less focused on how votes are counted in November and more focused on furthering the trend of opposition to Trump’s re-election.
As he frequently does, Trump contradicts himself when it matters. Trump’s a big fan of absentee voting, calling it “good” in a July 30 tweet denigrating the mail-in balloting process. Absentee voting is something he’s done himself more than once, as a resident of New York (in the 2018 midterm election) and, more recently, in this year’s Florida primaries. With mail-in balloting (the voting protocol in California, Oregon, Utah, Hawaii and Washington state for years, and Nevada just signed on), a registered voter is mailed an actual ballot. She fills the thing out and mails it back.
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Absentee voting is much the same thing: In states that allow it, qualified voters request absentee ballots from their state’s election authority. If approved, the voter receives an absentee ballot from election officials. The voter fills out the ballot and mails it back, same as with regular mail-in voting. It’s maybe a slightly longer process, and every state that permits absentee voting has slight variations on the rules, but it’s effectively the same thing with the same result: a vote you don’t have to stand in line to cast.
Which is why Trump’s support for absentee voting is hard to understand. As a way of voters expressing displeasure with Trump, absentee voting could be the problem Trump doesn’t think of as a problem. His preference for absentee voting over mail-in voting is, ultimately, support for a distinction without a difference — yet another unforced error from the dumpster fire on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Confidence in mail-in voting has broken along predictably partisan lines. The July 18 ABC News/Washington Post poll, which surveyed voting preferences and other issues, found that 66 percent of Democratic voters believed mail-in voting was safe from voter fraud. The poll found a 79 percent preference for in-person balloting among Republican voters. On that basis, Trump’s war against mail-in votes likely carries the day with GOP stalwarts sure to follow Trump’s lead no matter what.
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The current Trump calculus is to hamper the mail-in option, the better to enhance his chances in a close vote. But the 2020 presidential election may not be the nail-biter many are forecasting — or dreading — it will be. On July 12, the Post reported that the decline in favorable polling for Trump, and his poor handling of various national crises, “triggered what Democrats detect as a tectonic shift in the political landscape, with party leaders suddenly bullish about not only taking back the White House but also wresting control of the Senate, as well as expanding their House majority.”
Relatively fresh polling in battleground states gives that credence. CNBC’s July 29 poll shows former Obama vice president Joe Biden leading Trump by an average of three points in battlegrounds Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and North Carolina. The July 23 Quinnipiac poll of a head-to-head contest in Florida finds Biden leading Trump in every age cohort between 18 and 65 years old, from the low single digits to as much as 37 points.
Fox News’ June 25th survey of voters in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and deep-purple Texas had Biden leading in every state, by anywhere from one point to as much as 9 points. Polls from The New York Times, Siena College and CNN from early to mid-June indicated Biden bulges anywhere from 8 to 14 points.
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If these polls and others we’ve been digesting for months are even close to accurate, Trump’s electoral future basically arrives in four ways: early voting, the absentee voting Trump approves of, the mail-in voting Trump abhors, and the classic civic exercise of the franchise — the tiring wait in a long line on a cold Election Day.
Considering the variety of options available to the electorate, Trump’s fixation on mail-in voting as his boogeyman of choice seems overdone — not a first manifestation of that state of mind for the bloviator in chief. But that’s his perspective. For voters, the lop-sided responses to those polls and more besides indicate a candidate preference that’s method-agnostic. The proposed delivery style of ballots cast in November — the how of the vote — doesn’t much figure in the polling response. Just the who of the vote.
Trump’s disdain for or support of one voting method over others is almost irrelevant. Comprehensively and consistently, these polls are telling us who the American electorate would vote for right now — regardless of the method they’d use to do it. That’s hugely problematic for the Trump 2020 campaign.