Trump's mail-in voting lies are costing Republicans | Opinion

I recently received a mailer from a conservative super PAC that read "CONSERVATIVE VOTER ALERT … YOU'RE ELIGIBLE TO VOTE ABSENTEE … IT'S SAFE AND SECURE."

The irony should be obvious. But it points to a real problem for Republicans.

The damage President Donald Trump did to mail-in voting's reputation among Republicans in 2020 is still hurting the party's electoral prospects today. It's even siphoning money that could be spent far more productively on the campaign trail.

Trump undermines vote by mail's credibility among Republicans

Before 2020, researchers found that voting by mail didn't noticeably advantage either party. Republicans already harbored some distrust of it, rooted partly in long-standing claims about illegal immigrants voting ‒ but that distrust wasn't moving election results until Trump saw an opening and exploited it for his own benefit.

Then, the partisan divide opened up fast. Part of it was COVID-19: Republicans were simply less worried about catching the coronavirus at a polling place, while many Democrats avoided in-person voting. But Trump's rhetoric is what turned a gap into a chasm.

"There's fraud. They found them in creeks. They found some with the name Trump, just happened to have the name Trump, just the other day in a wastepaper basket," the president said in a debate against Democratic nominee Joe Biden in 2020. "This is going to be a fraud like you've never seen."

Trump completely destroyed the credibility of voting by mail among Republican voters ‒ then and even more so in the chaotic months after. Six years ago, 60% of Democrats voted absentee, compared with just 32% of Republicans.

"This is a fraud on the American public," Trump said after his election loss. "This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election."

Much of the litigation and the wild claims that followed centered on elaborate ballot-harvesting schemes, for which little evidence has ever surfaced. The fraud that has actually been found amounts to hundreds of votes ‒ nowhere near the millions it would have taken to flip the 2020 election.

Even after the pandemic ended and voters grew comfortable going in person again, the divide didn't close. In 2024, 37% of Democrats voted by mail. Only 24% of Republicans did.

And this isn't just a difference in behavior. It's a difference in reality: 74% of Republicans believe fraud has been a major or minor problem in presidential elections, compared with just 34% of Democrats. That's not just a gap in trust. It's two parties living in two different Americas.

Republicans were less favorable toward no-excuse absentee and early voting even before 2020, but support was still well over 50%. Since then, support has cratered to just 34%.

Trump has set Republicans back by undermining a good strategy

The logic behind promoting absentee voting is simple: Voting by mail makes it easier for people to cast a ballot, which increases the odds they actually do. Early voting of all kinds does something similar ‒ it lets parties lock in votes before Election Day, so a flat tire or a snowstorm on the morning of can't cost them a voter.

That leaves Republican operatives in a brutal spot: trying to improve the party's turnout while its own figurehead keeps sabotaging the strategy.

In the 2024 election, Republicans spent tens of millions of dollars trying to persuade their own voters to trust mail-in voting again. They even got Trump to haphazardly endorse it at one point ‒ but within months, he was back to bashing it. He just can't help himself.

He's still at it. "NO MAIL-IN BALLOTS (EXCEPT FOR ILLNESS, DISABILITY, MILITARY, OR TRAVEL!)" the White House posted on X on June 24.

Most recently, he's attempted to restrict mail-in ballots in states that don't produce complete lists of their eligible voters. A federal judge has blocked the order.

Critics call it a power grab ‒ an attempt to give Washington more control over how states run their own elections. The administration insists it's just an audit, to make sure "the right ballots are going to the right people."

Whatever the merits of that fight, the irony is hard to miss. While Trump tries to delegitimize mail-in voting, Republican-affiliated political action committees are spending real money trying to restore its legitimacy. Mailers like the one I received have gone toward a different line of attack, or toward simply getting more Republicans to the polls, instead of persuading them to trust a method of voting they trusted just fine a few years ago.

That's the real cost of Trump's conspiracy theory. Republicans playing catch-up on mail-in voting could shrink their majorities in the November midterm elections ‒ or decide who's sitting in the Oval Office in 2029.

Dace Potas is an opinion columnist for USA TODAY and a graduate of DePaul University with a degree in political science.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump's mail-in voting lies are costing Republicans | Opinion

Reporting by Dace Potas, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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This story was originally published June 26, 2026 at 4:31 AM.