For Donald Trump to defy the odds again, his supporters can’t fear mail-in voting

I’ve talked with Trump voters who, on the one hand, are reluctant to vote by mail and, on the other, are afraid to venture to the polls in person.

Matt Terrill

Opinion contributor

As the presidential race heads into the home stretch, President Donald Trump is learning the hard way that maligning mail-in voting is a dangerous and dubious strategy. The president has called voting by mail in 2020 “the greatest scam in the history of politics” and warned that it will be rife with fraud, yet it remains a critical option for at least 77% of American voters — especially Trump’s elderly and rural base during the pandemic. If the Republican Party doesn’t fix this soon, it will spell disaster for their candidates up and down the ballot.

In Florida, where mail ballots are to start being sent out Thursday, over 700,000 more Democrats have requested mail ballots than Republicans, a sharp departure from 2016 and 2018, when Republicans turned out tens of thousands more votes by mail than Democrats.

The same trend is manifesting in polls nationwide and across other critical swing states.

A recent ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 78% of Trump’s backers agree with his argument about mail-in voting, while only 28% of Biden’s supporters do. In North Carolina, the first state to mail out ballots, Democrats requested more than 337,000 ballots as of Sept. 4 and independents 200,000, while Republicans sought only 103,000. In Wisconsin, a Marquette University Law School poll found that 55% of Democrats said they planned to vote by mail compared with only 15% of Republicans.

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