Trump's Big Lie only hurt him. There's data to prove it

Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party has eviscerated the mail-in voting advantage party leaders spent two decades developing. Now, with the presidential primary season nearing its end, we have evidence that GOP legislators’ efforts to appease their king by making it more difficult to vote by mail aren’t helping their party and are hurting him. So, I wonder: Is this all part of Trump’s endgame?

Before we get there, remember the 2022 Georgia Senate runoff, when Trump kept arguing that the election was rigged? Republican turnout dropped, and early and absentee ballots helped Democrats flip the seat with Raphael Warnock's election.

Trump didn’t learn his lesson. He continues to denigrate mail-in voting and perpetuate conspiracy theories that voter fraud cost him the 2020 election.

Now, new research shows that Trump's crusade against mail-in voting is backfiring. According to a study in the Election Law Journal by researchers at the Universities of Florida and Alabama, the more voters embraced vote-by-mail in the primaries through mid-March, the worse Trump did.

In Vermont, for example, where all voters are automatically sent a ballot to vote by mail, Nikki Haley defeated Trump, making it the only state she won outright before suspending her campaign. In Florida and North Carolina, two states that passed sweeping restrictions on voting by mail after the 2020 election, Trump handily won the primaries but performed worse among voters who voted by mail than those who voted in person on Election Day. “Trump’s rhetoric undid the strength Republicans enjoyed among male voters,’’ concludes Michael P. McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist, and voting expert who authored the study.

Elections researchers have long shown that making it easier to vote by mail leads to higher voter turnout for both parties but confers no partisan advantage. In 11 red states where Republican legislators actively worked to discourage mail-in voting, the report found that mail voting declined, but so did turnout — to 17%. However, in California, Colorado, Vermont, and Washington, where officials delivered ballots to every eligible voter in the presidential primaries, and mail voting was widely accepted, researchers found that turnout rates rose, averaging just under 30%.

Political consultants know that getting voters to use mail-in ballots pays dividends because parties can bank the votes of high-propensity voters to avoid the risk of losing them due to bad weather, power outages, technology failures, or other major disruptions on Election Day. It also allows parties to use resources more efficiently — the sooner voters vote, the less often parties have to contact them again.

But here’s another irony: Research also shows that these reliable voters tend to be older, white, wealthier, and, until now, more Republican than other voters. Trump’s claims that mail-in voting equates to fraud have been disproven by the facts and discarded by courts. While there have been some cases of fraud, it is rare and the checks in place simply do not allow for the kind of widespread fraud Trump invents.

It’s too soon to know if Trump’s mail-in vote-bashing will make any difference in November. But it’s a remarkable about-face for Republicans who for years made absentee balloting a potent weapon against Democrats, who were slow to adopt the practice.

After George W. Bush’s slim victory over Al Gore in 2000, Republican legislators across the country passed no-excuse absentee voting laws to encourage their voters to bank their votes early. They were so committed to the strategy that when red states adopted voter identification laws, they explicitly exempted mail voters because that’s where their voters were, McDonald said.

That all changed with Trump. In nearly every one of his campaign stump speeches, the former president claims that "you automatically have fraud" when voters are allowed to vote by mail.

So why did Republicans concede their long-held vote-by-mail advantage to accommodate Trump? McDonald traces the answer to the 2016 Colorado presidential election, when Trump was behind Hillary Clinton in the polls and the state was launching its first all-mail election. Under this system, state officials delivered a ballot to every registered voter and implemented elaborate safety protocols before votes were tabulated.

In classic fashion, Trump derided the integrity of Colorado’s mail-in ballots by concocting a nefarious plot to justify his imminent loss to Clinton. His followers unleashed a host of conspiracy theories that continue today. Deriding mail-in voting and alleging unsubstantiated claims of widespread vote fraud became part of the Trump brand.

Now, the assumption that all mail voting is fraudulent is so baked into the DNA of his supporters that even if Trump changed his mind and tried to persuade people it was a reliable way to vote, “people won’t believe him,’’ McDonald said.

Anyone who isn’t Trump might realize this poses a problem if you’re trying to retain reliable voters who like the convenience of mail voting. Now-dethroned Republican Party Chair Ronna McDaniel last year launched a “Bank Your Vote” campaign in which Trump cut a video urging people to vote early and in person, avoiding any mention of voting by mail.

Data shows that the strategy didn’t work very well, either. In Florida, GOP presidential primary turnout in 2024 declined by more than 120,000 voters compared to the 2020 primary. The researchers found that the drop corresponded with the decline in mail-in ballots.

When Trump’s team took control of the party this month, the Washington Post reported that the “Bank Your Vote” campaign would be replaced by a “Grow The Vote” effort to draw new voters into the Republican Party. New hires also must pass a litmus test question that asks whether they believe the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen.

From this vantage point, Trump's strategy looks illogical. He’s now banking primarily on a single day to get votes out, preemptively declaring a large swath of the election system fraudulent and falsely claiming it is rigged. This signals to many supporters that their vote no longer matters, so why should they bother to vote?

It’s painful to consider, but this has all the signs of Trump trying to have it both ways. If he wins and undermines the integrity of the election system and the principles of liberal democracy in the process, he declares himself a dictator. If he loses, he does that same damage and what’s to stop him and his supporters from another insurrection? It’s either ineptitude or part of a very devious plan.