The hesitation is being driven from the top. Trump has dismissed mail voting as ripe for fraud, even though studies have found that voter fraud is rare. “Mail ballots, they cheat. Mail ballots are very dangerous for this country because of cheaters,” Trump said during a White House briefing earlier this month.
GOP campaign professionals largely know they can’t abandon it amid a pandemic — but they also know how important it is to the base to stick with the president.
“The instruction manual says, ‘Don’t publicly disagree with the president, but do whatever you need to do,’” said former Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.). “Certainly in Florida, I can assure you, the Republican Party and all Republican campaigns are going to be pursuing mail voting very aggressively.”
Operatives are focusing on the 34 states where registered voters can request an absentee ballot for any reason, particularly those states that only recently eased those requirements, like key battlegrounds Michigan and Pennsylvania. They pointed to the evidence out of Wisconsin, where more than two-thirds of voters cast ballots by mail even without any changes to election administration policy. Michigan and Pennsylvania could see similar jumps in mail-ballot participation depending on social-distancing requirements this fall.
“We’ll certainly see a much higher percentage of voting by mail [in 2020] than we saw in November 2016, which was less than 30 percent,” said Tanya Bjork, Organizing Together’s Wisconsin state director. “Groups like us are going to be leaning into getting people to vote by mail more aggressively.”
But voters in Michigan or Pennsylvania, new to the loosened absentee system, need to be educated on it, said John Brabender, a Republican strategist based in Pennsylvania. He said it “changes costs, it changes targeting, it changes timing of messages, and it goes from voter persuasion to also voter education.”
“Wisconsin was a wake-up call, and we’d better learn from it,” said Brabender, who is working on several all-mail Republican primaries slated for June.
Former National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Tom Davis said the party’s “assumption is that mail-in ballots help Democrats, and that’ll be true until Republicans figure out how to deal with it,” adding that “the problem is that [Republicans] are not used to employing this.”
In some states, little is likely to change. In two key Senate states — Colorado, which has universal vote by mail, and Arizona, where a substantial portion of the electorate vote by mail — campaigns were already focused on these tactics.
Source: politico.com
See more here: news365.stream
