Trump’s crusade against mail ballots is making his own defeat more likely

President Donald Trump is desperately trying to pre-delegitimize the results of the 2020 election, an effort supported by a well-funded legal campaign mounted by the Republican Party and conservative groups. This has quite reasonably been seen as a profound threat to the integrity, fairness and stability of our electoral system.

But what if in the process Trump is making his own defeat more likely?

Though that danger doesn’t seem to have occurred to the president, it may be exactly what he’s doing. There’s a very real possibility that the Republicans’ legal effort will fall short, while their public persuasion effort is extremely potent – but in all the wrong ways.

It’s often mentioned that just before the 2016 election, Trump said, “I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election, if I win.” Then, after losing the popular vote, he claimed millions of undocumented immigrants had voted, an absurd lie.

At the time, all this posturing amounted to minor stories about his norm-breaking, bizarre behavior, and ham-handed attempts to rewrite reality.

Now, however, it’s something different. Trump has turned an attack on mail voting into an enormous issue, both with his repeated claims that it is inherently fraudulent and with his party’s legal effort to undermine it. They are already filing lawsuits around the country to keep states and localities from expanding mail voting (along with other means of voter suppression).

But here’s the reality: There will be mail voting this year, more than ever before. The Republican legal effort may make some inroads to limit it, but it won’t get shut down entirely. And even if the Supreme Court is there to backstop them, that’s no guarantee of Republican victory, as we saw in the Wisconsin state Supreme Court race.

So think about Trump’s anti-mail-voting propaganda campaign in the context of our contemporary partisan divisions. He may be trying to discredit mail voting to set the stage for claiming, if he loses, that the election was illegitimate. But while he does that, he could also persuade Republicans not to vote by mail, while simultaneously convincing Democrats that they absolutely should vote by mail.

Trump’s attacks on mail voting may be aimed at MAGA-hat-wearing enthusiasts, but they’re heard just as well by independents and Democrats, who take from them a very different message.

After all, if Trump hates mail voting and you hate Trump, what better way to stick it to him than by getting your mail ballot in early? That in turn frees up the Democratic Party’s resources to expand its turnout efforts to other voters.

One strange aspect of this situation is that at the same time Trump is pounding on the message that mail voting is fraudulent, Republican Party officials are encouraging their own voters to utilize it. But a state party brochure or email is no match for the communicative power of the president.

Republicans working on the ground understand the danger. Here’s what one county GOP chair in Pennsylvania told the New York Times:

“Republicans are constantly being warned that mail-in voting leads to vote fraud,” [Giovanni] Landi said. “My concern is sometimes people think, ‘All right, I’m going to go to the polls,’ and then something comes up and they don’t make it to the polls.”

So while research has established that mail voting doesn’t inherently advantage either party, this year it could. Mail ballots could become another partisan symbol, much like face masks. If you decline to wear a mask to support the president, you’re more likely to contract covid-19, just as you may have to deal with Election Day problems if you support Trump by declining the opportunity to vote easily by mail.

Let’s be clear: There are many different ways in which this election could go sideways, some of which have to do with mail ballots. The fact that they will take longer to count – meaning we might not know the winner for days after the election – is just one factor that could create chaos.

But this is one more reminder that Trump is not a strategic genius. He operates on impulse, grievance, and the conviction that everyone is just as cynical and ill-intentioned as he is. If Democrats are trying to expand mail voting then it must be a plot to steal the election, so he has to oppose it with all the lies and venom he can shove through his Twitter feed.

And when he latches on to something like this, the people around him either can’t or won’t persuade him that he’s sabotaging himself. So they repeat his ludicrous claims, file the lawsuits, and remind everyone that voting by mail will make Trump mad. What more could Democrats ask for?