The contingent of Fox News- viewing older voters who will support Donald Trump no matter what during this pandemic election are gleefully following his lead by obstinately turning their backs on the very idea of mail-in ballots. But Politico is raising the alarm that Trump’s strategy of demonizing mail-in balloting may end up backfiring terribly as his base voters refuse to recognize reality in the midst of a public health crisis:
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.
For comparison purposes, the poll described above, commissioned by Democratic consultants Katie Merrill and Dave Metz, found that of Joe Biden’s supporters, only 1% felt that receiving a mail-in ballot would make them less likely to vote.
As Politico reporters Christopher Cadelago and Zach Montellaro observe, if the trend continues, and their Dear Leader continues to dangle the enticing but non-existent specter of ballot fraud in front of their glazed, credulous eyes, this critical contingent upon which Trump has bet his entire political future will likely drag him and other Republicans down into an electoral tar pit, to be chewed mercilessly to pieces by wave after wave of ravenous Democratic voters perfectly happy to mail in their ballots, and perfectly happy to wait for them to be counted by election officials who they’ve historically trusted in other neighborhood elections since they first voted.
Older voters are always the most reliable voters (because most of them are retired and have plenty of time to walk down to the polling place), but they are also the ones most likely to be impacted by COVID-19. The traditional “battleground” states such as Pennsylvania, Florida and Michigan are teeming with this demographic. As the authors point out, “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 crux of the problem, as the authors point out, is that "Trump’s voters skew older than Biden’s." And if those Trump voters have health concerns now, just imagine how they’re going to feel in November after the impact of Trump’s effort to superspread the virus throughout American schools reaches its logical conclusion, with schoolkids’ grandparents being the ultimate victims.
“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, BaughmanMerrill, 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.”
In attacking the reliability of mail-in voting, Trump has also unwittingly blown up conservative efforts to encourage it, as a precondition to their own electoral survival.
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 that is coming to pass: In Florida, 302,000 more Democrats have enrolled in the state’s vote-by-mail program than Republicans.
It seems that the only way Trump could possibly make this bizarre strategy work is by so crippling the U.S. Postal System that ballots could not properly be delivered on time. But the problem with that is that he is not only person on the ballot this November; thousands of Republicans at the federal, state and local level are also dependent on mail-in balloting, and their names are right there on the same ballot. So to sabotage the Postal Service, as many suggest Trump may be willing to do, would end up denying all of those Republicans their critical votes as well. Meanwhile the younger, Democratic voters, less at risk but considerably more angry, would continue to march to the polls, much as they did in Wisconsin earlier this year.
Of course, Trump is setting up a self-serving argument to attack the legitimacy of his own defeat. But does he really expect that strategy to be viable in a national election involving thousands of elected officials?
It appears that this is a gambit which can only end very badly for both Trump and the Republican Party.