On April 16, 2024, once and future Republican nominee for president Donald Trump wrote a curious post on his social-media website, Truth Social: “ABSENTEE VOTING, EARLY VOTING, AND ELECTION DAY VOTING ARE ALL GOOD OPTIONS. REPUBLICANS MUST MAKE A PLAN, REGISTER, AND VOTE!” Only a year and half ago, he was writing on the same platform: “REMEMBER, YOU CAN NEVER HAVE FAIR & FREE ELECTIONS WITH MAIL-IN BALLOTS – NEVER, NEVER, NEVER. WON’T AND CAN’T HAPPEN!!!”
Clearly, Republican operatives who have long been appalled by the Trump-driven GOP insistence on trying to turn out Republican voters only in person and on Election Day finally prevailed on Trump to bow to reality and common sense. He’s done a lot of damage, though: If the marked tendency of Republican-inclined voters as discerned over the past three election cycles is any measure, they have taken Trump’s original message — the one he has trumpeted to all with ears to hear for years — to heart. And now the Republican Party trails dangerously behind in a form of voting they used to frequently outstrip Democrats in — and one which, given the shift of their victory coalition away from high-propensity-voting educated suburbanites to low-propensity-voting working-class voters, is the skeleton key to almost all future national Republican victories.
Reasonable people may disagree about the civic value of early and mail-in voting. (It is honestly appalling to see states such as Pennsylvania allow residents to vote in mid September, or ones such as California adopt such lax ballot security and counting standards that elections are often not decided until December.) But it is a legal fact on the ground in 2024 and, unless changed by state or federal law, is not going away — certainly not on its own, no matter how much one looks away. The argument that mail-in balloting is inherently “fraudulent” has been advanced by Trump chiefly as a way to buttress his bogus claims about 2020 and, in any event, is a function of statewide practice, not federal laws (ask a resident of Seattle, Minneapolis, or Chicago). These are the rules of the game.
It is therefore critically urgent to reckon with the state of play as it exists and use every legal means to turn out voters. When Ron DeSantis was running for president last year, he by contrast was admirably frank about how the game has to be played: “I’m not going to fight with one hand tied behind my back. I’m going to have organizations in all the swing states. If they are harvesting, we’re harvesting.”
That is how you fight to win. The cause of election reform is a worthy and urgent one, and Congress can have some role under Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution, although the states do and should retain primacy in this area. Republican candidates and lawmakers can and should promote more-secure elections, and Republican-run states have taken important steps to do so since 2020. But this is a serious legislative undertaking requiring careful legislative drafting and artful political persuasion rather than demagoguery in support of fanciful theories of how the 2020 election was supposedly stolen. Those who rail against early and mail voting, or condemn Republican politicians who argue the necessity of playing by the rules as they exist, should recall that in order to reform election law you need to win elections first — and this is the system Republicans must win under. It is regrettable that Donald Trump’s private mania became that of his supporters years ago, but perhaps it is not too late for Republican politicians and voters to realize that nobody has ever changed a flawed system by repeatedly shooting himself in the foot.