The GOP’s Mail Voting Allergy Still Persists

Jimmy Keady, the founder and president of JLK Political Strategies, a GOP consulting firm, is telling Fox News Digital that Republicans are doing a better job of early voting. That’s based on Decision Desk HQ data showing that relative to 2020, “the Democratic lead in vote-by-mail requests has shrunk by over 5% in Florida, nearly 15% in North Carolina and over 35% in Pennsylvania.”

“It definitely signals that A, there’s turnout… but B, also that the base has adopted, kind of being able to accept that early voting is a proper and mostly secure way to vote,” Keady said.

I’m not sure this is really such great news for the Trump-Vance ticket, however. But, first, let me remind you of the scene from the summer of 2020. It was the pre-vaccine height of the pandemic. On June 15, I wrote about President Trump’s self-defeating war on vote-by-mail, using Florida as my prime example. In June, I wrote Trump Has Destroyed the GOP’s Vote-By-Mail Advantage in Florida. By that time, the Biden campaign had opened up “a 302,000-voter advantage over Republicans in vote-by-mail enrollment” in the Sunshine State, which was a complete reversal from 2016 when more Republican Floridians voted by mail than Democrats.

In Pennsylvania, by contrast, we did not have a no-excuse vote-by-mail option at all prior to the pandemic. Unlike in Florida, where Republicans historically had the option and were more inclined than Democrats to use it, in Pennsylvania it was a new concept. And Trump told his supporters it was unreliable and a potential source of fraud. He also kept complaining about safety measures to keep people safe from COVID-19, which made Republicans less inclined to worry about queuing up in lines to vote in-person. The results were predictable and I did predict them. The Republican mail-in advantage in Florida was completely reversed, and in Pennsylvania the Democrats gained a giant new advantage by banking many, many more early votes than the GOP.

Keady does a good job of explaining why this is important:

Getting voters out to early in-person voting or to vote by mail can free up resources for campaigns, Keady said, allowing them to focus their attention on lower propensity voters who often play a big role in deciding elections.

“I’m sure voters complain all the time about text messages, about getting mail, about getting robocalls to go vote,” Keady said. “Campaigns are now sophisticated enough that once you go vote, those stop… once a voter goes to vote, and those stop, that allows resource allocation from that voter to another voter.”

Despite winning the vote-by-mail battle, the 2020 election in Florida did not go well for the Democrats. and it was even worse in 2022. The state is drifting to the right. One reason the Democrats’ didn’t do better in 2020 is that Florida also has a robust in-person early voting system, and very few Democrats chose that method. In other words, Democrats early voted by mail and Republicans early voted in-person, and it largely canceled out. But there was no in-person early voting option in Pennsylvania, and so the Dems banked a huge and probably decisive advantage.

Now, hopefully this helps you understand why there’s such a big difference in Decision Desk HQ’s numbers for the two states in 2024. In Florida, the Democratic lead in vote-by-mail requests has shrunk by about 5 percent. That’s really not much of a change, and it’s to be expected that there would be some reversion to pre-pandemic splits. Remember that before the pandemic, voting-by-mail was familiar to Floridians and more popular with Republicans. But if the Democrats still have an edge, then it’s still an improvement over the status quo ante.

The change in Pennsylvania is significant, with a 35 percent reduction in the Democratic advantage. But, again, few Pennsylvania Republicans chose to vote by mail in 2020 because they were not familiar with it and President Trump was telling them not to trust the voting method. The numbers are telling. There were 1,702,484 Democrats who cast mail ballots in 2020 compared to 623,404 Republicans. That gave the Democrats over a million vote advantage before any Election Day votes were cast, and the final outcome was 3,458,229 votes for Biden compared to 3,377,674 votes for Trump.

If I am a supporter of Trump, I’m encouraged to see that more Pennsylvania Republicans are asking for mail ballots, but the 35 percent number isn’t as significant as it might seem. In 2020, 64.7 percent of Pennsylvania ballot requests were made by Democrats compared to 23.7 percent by Republicans, and the Democrats had a higher return rate. (87.7 percent to  79.4 percent). Cutting into that 39 percent deficit by a little more than a third is helpful, but we’re still talking about a 25 or so percent advantage for the Dems. And this won’t be offset by any early in-person option.

Again, given that the 2020 election was held during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, many more Democrats were eager to stay safe and vote by mail, while Republicans were actively discouraged from either staying safe or voting by mail. We should expect more natural splits in our current environment. It’s not just that Republicans are more comfortable voting by mail this time, but also that Democrats are more comfortable voting in person.

No matter what, I would expect the splits to be less dramatic in 2024 than they were in 2020. The way the splits look in Florida and Pennsylvania reflect much more  the political and voting situation in 2020 than anything specific to the current campaign.

The truth is, the Democrats will still have an enormous early voting advantage in Pennsylvania and that this will make it easier for them to do their get out the vote work on Election Day. That’s a legacy of Trump poisoning his own supporters’ view of mail voting in 2020, and he’s going to pay a price for it.

If the GOP wants to grasp for good news, they can seize on these numbers, but they don’t concern me. They are exactly what I would expect.