Pa. Republicans are pushing mail-in voting for 2024, but Trump-fueled skepticism remains in the party

The 2024 presidential election in Pennsylvania, a critical swing state, could come down to whether the Republican Party can execute a drastic shift in strategy from four years ago.

Democracy & Doubt
Pittsburgh navigates trust and choice in the 2024 election season

Local and national Republican leaders are trying to get their party base to vote by mail in advance of the Nov. 5 Election Day — a remarkable change from recent years when former President Donald Trump and other prominent figures disparaged mail balloting, using false claims of fraud to encourage supporters to vote on Election Day only.

Republican usage of mail-in voting in Pennsylvania has stayed consistently low since 2020, including in last month’s primaries, and some officials say they hear persistent skepticism of the voting method from voters.

The result of the rhetoric pushed by Trump ahead of his unsuccessful 2020 re-election bid, and repeated at times this year, was Democrats dominating vote-by-mail results, essentially giving the party a significant head start in voting.

Republicans ceding the mail vote to Democrats is like “running a 100-yard race against someone and giving them a 50-yard head start,” said Sam DeMarco, the chair of the Republican Committee of Allegheny County.

In each election since universal mail-in voting was legalized in Pennsylvania in 2019, Democrats racked up huge advantages in the pre-Election Day vote, leaving Republicans with just 13 hours of polling on Election Day to catch up.

In 2020, President Joe Biden won 76% of the mail vote in Pennsylvania. Despite a strong showing among Election Day voters, it was too much for Trump to overcome and Biden held on to win the Commonwealth by about one percentage point.

The split was even starker in 2022, when Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro won 83% of the mail-in votes against Trump-endorsed Republican nominee Doug Mastriano. And in the most recent voting — last month’s presidential primaries — Republicans cast about a quarter of the mail in ballots.

Can the GOP change course?

Much like voters can be persuaded to vote for a candidate, they can be persuaded to use a particular voting method, according to Charles Stewart, a professor of political science at MIT who authored a report on voting methods in the 2020 election.

“Things are really going to depend on, now, what the campaigns do to try to generate voting by mail,” Stewart said. “I think there’s going to be special interest in Pennsylvania and battleground states on precisely this issue.”

There are signs that the Republican party nationally, including Trump, are warming to that idea. Trump recorded a video message asking Republicans to vote early , posted a similar message to his Truth Social page, and asked donors to contribute to a “ballot harvesting fund,” according to the Associated Press .

Months after beginning these efforts to encourage early voting, though, Trump continued his false claims about the security of mail-in voting. “We have to get rid of mail-in ballots because once you have mail-in ballots, you have crooked elections,” Trump said in a speech after the Iowa caucuses in January, according to NPR . He called mail-in balloting “ totally corrupt ” in February.

Just this week, in a KDKA-TV interview , Trump said the country should move to a system with “one-day voting, one-day election,” and falsely said that mail-in ballot fraud cost him Pennsylvania in 2020.

“Any time you have mail-ins, anytime you have the kinds of things that they have in Pennsylvania … I mean we just have to stop it,” Trump said to KDKA’s Jon Delano.

“Absolutely, [Trump’s] comments play a role” in Pennsylvania Republicans’ continued resistance to voting by mail, DeMarco said.

“We still have the folks out there that claim they don’t trust it.”

DeMarco has been urging his party members to vote by mail for years, often through his social media accounts and his newsletter, “The Weekly Trunk.” But his push has had little effect on the data, without high-powered fundraisers or party celebrities backing it.

That could change, he said, if Trump leans into the effort.

“The best thing he could do is come to Pennsylvania for a rally and while there, hold up and wave a mail-in ballot and say we need to beat them at their own game, we need to get everyone to vote early,” DeMarco said.

Asked if he thinks Trump will do just that, DeMarco said: “Only in my dreams.”

The Trump campaign responded to a request for comment via email, pointing to a video Trump posted May 9 on his Truth Social platform in which he said absentee voting, early voting and Election Day voting were “all good options.”

Any support for mail-in balloting would be an about-face for Trump, who still holds false claims of voter fraud near the core of his bid to return to the White House. The juxtaposition of those claims and the GOP’s push for early voting could confuse some voters, said Kristin Kanthak, an associate professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh.

“It’s a difficult tap dance to say, yes you should absolutely mail in those ballots this year, but also we’re still whispering about alleged fraud from last time,” Kanthak said. “I don’t know how much voters are buying it.”

Eyeing ‘the warehouse’

Jim Jenkins, a local GOP committeeman and a member of the Bethel Park Municipal Council, said some in the municipality are still focused on complaints about the 2020 election.

“Unfortunately it seems like darn near every [Bethel Park Republican] Committee meeting someone wants to stand up and talk about how the election in 2020 was fixed or wasn’t right,” said Jenkins, one of three Republicans elected to Bethel Park’s legislative council last fall.

He said the party leadership’s push for mail-in voting could be a “long, slow process.”

“I think there are still too many people out there that don’t trust it,” Jenkins said. “I think that’s what the hold up is.”

Todd McCollum, the chair of the Pittsburgh Republican Committee, said he was skeptical about mail-in ballots in the past but has grown more comfortable with them.

“Maybe I’m naive,” McCollum said. “I trust the system enough to go with that.”

He said many Republican voters in the city, though, have not come around.

“They don’t trust the warehouse,” McCollum said, referring to the facility where mail-in ballots are processed and counted by county workers on Election Day. “They think there’s too much time to finagle something in the warehouse.”

The concern echoes conspiracy theories that spun up in 2020, which falsely alleged that thousands of fraudulent mail-in ballots were being counted in a Philadelphia vote-counting facility.

M J Costello, the leader of the conservative activist group TeamRED, which worked unsuccessfully to unseat DeMarco as party chair in 2022, said in response to emailed questions that she urges people to vote “however [they] want to vote,” but that mail-in ballots are tallied by the county “with zero transparency to the public.”

Ballots are opened and scanned in a county warehouse where live-streaming cameras allow the public to watch along with observers from both parties monitoring in person.

In an interview earlier this year, DeMarco said he has worked since 2020 to increase camera coverage and transparency in the warehouse, saying there are now 91 cameras and two redundant systems.

Another Republican committeeman, Bob Hillen, said of the voters he speaks to, “most of them are not OK” with mail-in voting.

“The older the folks are, they’re saying, ‘Well if you want to vote you should vote in person,’” said Hillen, who chairs a Republican committee for Pittsburgh’s South Hills. “Others are concerned that the votes can be tampered with.”

Asked if he shares that concern, Hillen said, “People are going to find a way to do what they’re going to do sooner or later. I’m sure if you want to vote and cheat, you can do it with mail-in balloting.”

The fallout

An over-dependence on Election Day votes could compound one of Trump’s biggest challenges in this election: Biden’s significant fundraising advantage over him.

“The two campaigns are going to be constrained by the amount of money they have to spend,” MIT’s Stewart said. “The most expensive supporters to get to the polls are the ones who vote on Election Day.”

While campaigns spend money contacting and encouraging Election Day voters up until Nov. 5, they can stop spending money targeting mail-in voters as soon as their ballot is returned.

“If all of your supporters are refusing mail-in ballots, then you’re going to have to reach them as much as possible before Election Day,” said Kanthak, of Pitt. “But if they go ahead and vote … you don’t have to have a phone bank call them on Election Day to remind them to vote, you don’t have to provide rides to the polls.”

Choosing to vote on Election Day also leaves voters vulnerable to last-minute issues like illness, lack of childcare or job scheduling, which could keep them from the polls on Election Day. If severe weather hits on Election Day, it will have a more adverse effect on the party that relies more on Election Day votes.

DeMarco said the GOP needs to improve its mail vote performance to win statewide — something it hasn’t done in a federal election since 2016, and hasn’t done in any statewide contest since a low-turnout judicial race in 2021.

He said the GOP doesn’t need to dominate the mail-in vote. He estimated that if Republicans capture 35% of the early vote — which would be a 12-percentage-point improvement over Trump’s 2020 share — the 45th president could win Pennsylvania and possibly become the 47th.

Charlie Wolfson is PublicSource’s local government reporter and a Report for America corps member. He can be reached at charlie@publicsource.org .

This story was fact-checked by Cionna Sharpe.

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