Politics

Republicans push mail-in voting for the midterms in defiance of Trump

Published

11 months ago

December 17, 2025

Republicans are making mail-in voting a core part of their midterm battle plans — a sharp contrast with President Donald Trump’s efforts to abolish the practice as they scramble to turn out his base.

In Wisconsin, the state party is preparing a full-court press of mailers, emails, phone banks, door knocks and digital ads to get voters to sign up for mail ballots.

In Michigan, the Monroe County GOP ran a social media campaign ahead of the fall election urging voters to utilize permanent absentee ballots and is planning an even bigger push next year.

In Pennsylvania, where Republicans poured $16 million into boosting the number of GOP voters using mail ballots in 2024, the state party chair called it “a priority” for 2026. The nonprofit Citizens Alliance, which aided efforts to get Republicans to return their mail ballots in Pennsylvania last year, is planning to knock 750,000 doors ahead of the midterms to encourage infrequent voters to embrace the practice.

And the Republican National Committee intends to build on the aggressive early mail and in-person voting campaign it ran successfully in 2024, after shying away from the practice in 2020, while also supporting election security efforts including stopping ballots from being counted after Election Day, according to a person granted anonymity to describe the committee’s plans.

“Democrats have built a pretty massive structural advantage in early voting for a long, long time. And we just can’t keep going into election night 100,000 votes down and expect to make it up in 12 hours,” Wisconsin GOP Chair Brian Schimming said in an interview. “Treating early voting as optional, or something Democrats do, is a losing gamble.”

Trump has long falsely decried mail voting as rife with fraud. Over the summer, he vowed that Republicans “are going to do everything possible [to] get rid of mail-in ballots.” In November, and again this week, he called on Senate Republicans to eliminate the filibuster and pass a law to ban mail-in voting.

But, as has been the case for several years, he and his party are out of sync.

Rattled by electoral losses across the country this year and fearing a turnout slump in 2026 when control of Congress is on the line, Republican party chairs and operatives in battleground states Trump flipped by razor-thin margins in 2024 are turning to mail-in voting to keep lower-propensity voters engaged when he’s not on the ballot. They’re redoubling the 2024 efforts they ran successfully despite Trump alternating between promoting and railing against the practice — a turnabout after his vilification of mail ballots contributed to GOP losses in 2020.

Now, back in office, Trump is escalating his war against mail ballots. He signed an executive order in March that attempted to bar states from counting ballots that arrive after Election Day, along with other election-system overhauls. Judges have blocked most of the order, and the Supreme Court is set to decide whether federal law prohibits states from counting late-arriving ballots postmarked by Election Day.

Despite pledging to “lead a movement” to eliminate “corrupt” voting by mail ahead of the midterms, Trump has yet to issue another executive order on it. State courts have upheld vote-by-mail programs expanded during the pandemic. And presidents have little authority over state-run elections, whose rules are guided by federal and state law rather than presidential decree.

State and local Republicans, seeing few paths to overturning mail voting programs, are forging ahead — swallowing their own misgivings about ballot security in an effort to cut into a Democratic advantage as early voting options turn Election Day into election season.

Pressed about their mission appearing antithetical to Trump’s rhetoric, Republican operatives uniformly insisted they’re simply trying to play by the rules they’ve been given and that they support the president trying to change them — even if they’re unsure he’ll succeed.

“In Michigan, that’s the law of the land unless we can find a U.S. constitutional override, which I doubt that’s going to happen,” said Jim Runestad, a state senator who chairs the Michigan Republican Party. So, he said, “we’ll be fully engaged in early and absentee voting — we have to be.”

Still, the renewed dispute between Trump and his party over mail-in voting is the latest evidence of cracks forming in the ordinarily unified Republican Party. GOP lawmakers throughout the country, from New Hampshire to Indiana, have been rebuffing the president’s push for an aggressive redistricting effort to shore up his party’s chances of keeping its slim House advantage next year. Democrats need to net just three seats in order to seize control over the lower chamber. And several members of Trump’s base, namely departing Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, bucked him on the yet-to-be-released Jeffrey Epstein files.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Republicans have already shown some success in convincing their voters to embrace mail voting. In Pennsylvania — where now-Sen. Dave McCormick’s campaign, party committees and outside groups spent millions promoting the practice — GOP voters cast 32.4 percent of mail ballots in 2024, up from 23.7 percent four years earlier, helping Trump narrowly flip the state. Roughly one in five Republican voters who cast ballots in the state that year had not participated in any elections since 2020, suggesting the method worked for some low-propensity voters who the party has to work harder to turn out.

Nationally, roughly three in 10 ballots in the 2024 general election were cast by mail, according to a U.S. Election Assistance Commission report from June. That was down from 43 percent in 2020, at the pandemic’s peak, but higher than pre-Covid, according to the report.

“We have to encourage people to embrace mail-in voting and early voting,” Pennsylvania GOP Chair Greg Rothman said in an interview. “That has to be a priority for us in 2026.”

Rothman won’t be alone in that fight. Citizens Alliance, the nonprofit founded by Pennsylvania-based conservative activist Cliff Maloney that hired over 100 people to chase ballots across roughly 500,000 doors in 2024, is gearing up to knock 750,000 in 2026. The Republican State Leadership Committee, which helped fund mail-ballot programs in Pennsylvania last year, put more than $2 million behind turnout efforts in New Jersey and Virginia this year and said it’s “doubling down” on the program in 2026.

“Without Trump on the ballot, the low-propensity problem is an epidemic” and “Republicans have to adapt or die,” Maloney said. “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.”

State and county parties in Wisconsin and Michigan are planning similarly aggressive efforts, though they, like other Republican officials interviewed for this story, declined to share details or put price tags on strategies still taking shape. In Michigan, where voters can sign up for a permanent mail ballot list, Monroe County GOP Chair Todd Gillman sees it as a way to get more people engaged in more under-the-radar local elections.

But even as they try to make inroads with mail voting, Republicans in other states are attempting to follow Trump in restricting the practice. Ohio’s GOP-controlled Legislature last month passed a bill that would invalidate nearly all ballots received after Election Day that were postmarked prior to the deadline. The state’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, is now weighing whether to sign it. Utah GOP Gov. Spencer Cox signed a similar bill earlier this year. Republican-led Kansas Legislature overrode Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto of another bill eliminating the grace period, which is being challenged in court.

And Republicans pushing mail-in voting remain somewhat hamstrung by their standard bearer’s scaremongering, which has sown a deep distrust among GOP voters that party officials and activists say they’re still working to reverse.

Trump made baseless claims of mail-voting fraud the basis for his constellation of stolen-election conspiracy theories in 2020. He piled on in 2024, suggesting scores of Pennsylvania ballots were fraudulent and accusing postal workers of “purposefully” losing some mail ballots — even as his campaign, the RNC and GOP-aligned groups prioritized early voting initiatives. Last month, as Californians voted to approve mid-decade redistricting in response to a GOP-led redraw in Texas, Trump threatened legal action that never materialized over ballots cast by mail in a state that sends one to every voter.

GOP operatives have a script for that, insisting to wary Republicans that they’ve made voting by mail more secure and informing them of the various options they have to ensure their ballots reach election offices, including hand delivery.

“We don’t necessarily like early voting or absentee ballots,” Gillman said. “But those are the rules we have to play by.”

Jessica Piper contributed to this report.

Politics

November 2026

Published

54 minutes ago

November 1, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Political cartoons from the desk of Matt Wuerker

Politics

Progressives and moderate Dems are already jockeying to claim credit for Tuesday

Published

1 hour ago

November 1, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

For Democrats, the size of their victory matters.

Progressives and moderates have been sparring all cycle over who will get to claim credit if they win on Tuesday. A new POLITICO Poll shows that the bigger the win, the more Democrats appear inclined to see it as a mandate to run more progressive candidates.

A smaller-than-expected victory next week would leave the party — and voters — torn over which direction to go.

The results reveal that the midterm election will have major implications over the next stage of the Democratic Party war over their identity — and could give progressives fresh ammunition ahead of a critical 2028 presidential race. Party insiders are closely watching contests where that infighting has been on display: From Abdul El-Sayed’s battle for Michigan Senate and Troy Jackson’s for Maine Senate, to Randy Villegas’ House race in California and Manny Rutinel’s in Colorado.

More than a dozen Democratic Party operatives and strategists said in interviews that both factions are already preparing to see a blue wave as validation of its own approach. Top super PACs and campaign firms are finishing strategy memos and finalizing lineups for a slate of post-election conferences where they intend to claim their way is the party’s future.

“You know what they say: Victory has a thousand mothers, right?” said Oliver Libby, the Democratic author behind the book “Strong Floor, No Ceiling,” which became a rallying cry for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries this cycle.

The survey, conducted by PF Global, found Democrats are nearly evenly split over what a smaller-than-expected victory next week would mean for future elections: 37% said it would signal a need to run more progressive candidates in the next election, while 35% said it would show the party should run more moderates. Another 28% said they didn’t know.

Those divisions largely fall along ideological lines. Among self-identified progressives, 52% said a smaller-than-expected victory would show that Democrats should run more progressive candidates. Meanwhile, a 45% plurality of self-identified moderates said that the same result would be evidence that the party should nominate more moderates, while just 28% percent said to run more progressives.

But if Democrats sweep key races — presented in the survey as a “large victory” — both progressives and moderates move toward running more progressive candidates in the next election. A majority of self-identified progressives — 61% — said it would show that the party should run more progressive candidates, while 35% of self-identified moderates agreed (compared with the 28% who said this for a smaller margin of victory).

A majority of Democratic midterm voters, including majorities of both self-identified progressives and moderates, also said a large victory would mean the party has a winning strategy for the 2028 presidential election, according to the poll.

“If Democrats had half a brain cell, they would look for the things that those two movements have in common,” said Chuck Rocha, a veteran Democratic strategist who has advised prominent candidates in both camps. “Whoever can combine these two things is who’s going to end up being somebody who is going to be a stalwart in ‘28.”

Progressives are eager for Tuesday’s results to bolster their argument that the party should move further to the left and that their candidates can win in competitive general elections. They’ve spent years feeling like they were being discounted by the party’s establishment wing, which was convinced that only more moderate candidates could cut into Trump’s coalition.

Progressives have cast a slate of battleground House and Senate races where their candidates felled more moderate primary rivals as major proof points — none more so than El-Sayed in purple Michigan’s marquee Senate race. A victory there, they say, could help springboard some of their biggest stars, like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), for presidential bids. Both representatives and a slate of other progressive surrogates up through Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) have hit the trail to help.

“Our North Star in 2026 is to prove the concept that bold, shake up the system economic fighters can win anywhere, including purple and red areas, as a prelude to the presidential election in 2028,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “We think we will have plenty to work with after the election. For us, Abdul is Exhibit A.”

PCCC is drafting a memo touting what it predicts as “two common themes in election winners: Outsiders and economic fighters who challenge corporate power,” according to a draft viewed by Blue Light News.

Moderates, meanwhile, are poised to point to results as evidence that building broad coalitions can help Democrats compete in Republican strongholds.

“The interpretation game is already under way,” said Matt Bennett, co-founder of the centrist think-tank Third Way, which has been conducting advertising analysis and polling the electorate, with plans to release its findings after Election Day. “[Progressives] are going to cherry pick the couple of races that they win, and they are going to say, therefore … everybody should go to the left.”

A memo from The Bench — a Democratic organization that supports candidates with real-world experience, such as teachers, nurses or veterans — touts recruits like James Talarico in Texas and Adam Hamilton in Kansas as evidence of the strength of its approach working. Public polling shows Talarico and Hamilton in a competitive position in once-solid safe red states.

“While much of the Democratic establishment was busy studying how to talk to working people, our answer was simpler: Run them,” the memo released this week reads.

“I saw Democrats, a lot of people in the 2020 primary, adopt positions that were just electoral poison,” said Democratic strategist Lis Smith, an architect of Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign who is a senior adviser to The Bench and works with The Bench’s sister organization, Majority Democrats. “You had Democrats say decriminalize border crossing, defund the police, and things like that. And we just can’t go back there as a party. We’re not going to be a majority party if we go down that road again.”

A new memo obtained by Blue Light News from Blue Dog PAC, a moderate Democratic group chaired by Rep. Adam Gray (D-Calif.), already makes the case that there was a “Blue Dog overperformance in 2024 and the Trump era.” It points to over a dozen House races the group is involved in that were initially rated as “Solid Republican” or “Likely Republican” by the Cook Political Report, and are finishing the cycle in the “Lean Republican,” “Toss Up” and “Lean Democratic” columns.

But some Democrats say that all this focus on who won the progressive-moderate fight is missing the point entirely.

“Actually doing something if we do win majorities, that’s more important than a bunch of memos saying we’re the reason we won,” said Bill Neidhardt, who worked on Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign and is now advising Will Lawrence, who’s running for Michigan’s 7th District, and working to boost El-Sayed.

“Whether one super PAC says to the other super PAC, ‘We’re the better super PAC’ — I just think if that’s what victory looks like to you in 2026, you’re going to set the Democrats up to lose in 2028,” he added.