I wrote a piece on June 24, 2020, called “Trump Has Destroyed the GOP’s Vote-by-Mail Advantage in Florida.” On Wednesday, August 5, 2020, you got the opportunity to read the same thing in the Washington Post. At some point between these two articles, someone finally got through to Trump and made him understand his error:
Nevada has ZERO infrastructure for Mail-In Voting. It will be a corrupt disaster if not ended by the Courts. It will take months, or years, to figure out. Florida has built a great infrastructure, over years, with two great Republican Governors. Florida, send in your Ballots!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 5, 2020
As Greg Sargent notes, the campaign’s goal here is “to delegitimize vote-by-mail in states where they think it will hurt Trump, while legitimizing it in places where they think it will help him.” This is a fallback position–an effort at mitigation. As I predicted, Republican voters were not able to make fine distinctions about where mail voting is good and desirable and where it is bad and corrupt. When Trump attacked expanded mail voting in states like Michigan, it made his base reluctant to trust mail voting in states like Florida where the practice has been long established.
Rather than admit a strategic blunder or completely change course, the attempt at a solution involves promoting mail voting wheel there is a “great infrastructure” and “great Republican Governors” and dissuading it where it is being newly introduced by Democratic governors.
To be clear, this really was a blunder:
As of Wednesday, more than 600,000 more Democrats had requested mail ballots than Republicans, according to the University of Florida’s Michael McDonald. For comparison: in the 2018 governor’s race, Republican Ron DeSantis beat Democrat Andrew Gillum by fewer than 50,000 votes.
Similarly, a recent CNN/SSRS poll found that 59% of voters who “lean Democratic” said they would prefer to vote via mail ballot compared to just 21% of Republican-leaning voters.
When I wrote my piece in June, the Democrats’ advantage was only 302,000 voters, and I already considered that catastrophic for the president. Fortunately, he doesn’t listen to me, but he did eventually get the message after losing in every survey of Florida taken in July.
There’s a secondary play here, too, that we must consider. A lot of votes will be uncounted on Election Night, and as a result some states may not be called for either candidate. Trump may want to argue that the counting should stop, especially if he has a narrow lead that is likely to evaporate once all the mail votes are included. He’s preparing the ground for that argument, so this is more serious than just a laughable effort at mitigation. Biden needs to prep the battlefield in response.
Stupid question- I thought some states will count votes as they come in? I remember back in 08, I think it was on the openleft blog that one of the bloggers there looked at the votes before the election and concluded Obama had practically already won. Could that happen again this time?
My impression is that Florida does actually count mail in votes prior to election day so it is NOT one of the places where we will wait weeks for a final answer. California and NY have taken the longest in the current cycle, and so wont affect the election day outcome.
5
from American Prospect’s David Dayen Covid Newsletter August 13, 2020:
Mail Pattern Boldness
The situation with the Postal Service has begun to hit a critical mass. Clearly the Capitol Forum’s reporting was correct, and there is a gouging in progress with the aforementioned state and local governments over postage for ballot delivery. Top postal officials are claiming that they’re just advising governments about the standard timelines for delivery on marketing mail relative to first class, but in the past, political mailings have been treated like first class mail, according to everyone involved with the process.
This is just a pretense to make ballot mailing less affordable and induce some states or localities to change their practices. California Secretary of State Alex Padilla explicitly calls them “proposed changes to postal service and pricing.” Anyone who doubted that this was happening should doubt no longer.
Meanwhile, mail sorting equipment is vanishing from post offices, and tens of thousands of letters are piling up even in relatively small communities. As far as the election is concerned, Trump openly admitted today that he’s holding up any funding to facilitate mail-in voting. “If we don’t make the deal, that means they can’t have the money, that means they can’t have universal mail-in voting,” he told Fox Business.
I don’t think strongly worded letters are going to cut it, at least not from one party. This is an attack on commerce in America, and a theft in progress of the vote.”