The GOP is desperately trying to promote early voting, but Donald Trump will not allow them.

There is a reason why he won’t stop and why it is going to hurt the GOP’s congressional races

I don’t remember who it was, but I think it was a well-known Democratic political strategist who said in an interview that if everyone votes, Donald Trump will win. I have no idea where they got that idea. It’s something some of my European friends keep telling me. Every time I hear it, my reflexive response is,

Fuck No

But saying whatever comes to mind and trying to turn it into truth isn’t something we can do. That’s what Putin and Trump’s followers do. So, let’s never go down that path. I wanted to make sure my hunch was right, so I went to the U.S. Census Bureau, downloaded their November 2020 tables, then checked Pew Research Center for Biden and Trump’s vote shares for that year and plugged the data in.

Here’s what I found.

The next time someone tells you that the United States is lost and that if everyone voted, Donald Trump would win, tell them no — he would have lost in 2020 by a margin of 24.171 million votes.

That’s the number.

So, I’m not really surprised that Donald Trump keeps attacking early voting and voters who want to mail in their ballots. Convenience increases turnout, and accessibility brings out low-propensity voters. If everyone votes, Donald Trump would face a +24-million-vote defeat in 2024.

The natural consequence of his understanding that he needs to reduce turnout to win is this:

In just the last few weeks, the former president has dismissed early voting as “stupid,” falsely claimed that 20 percent of mail ballots in Pennsylvania are “fraudulent,” suggested mail carriers could “lose hundreds of thousands of ballots, maybe purposefully,” and baselessly accused Democrats of exploiting a program that sends ballots to overseas and military voters to evade citizenship checks.

Trump’s vilification of mail and early voting methods, a key component of his web of stolen-election conspiracy theories, stoked a deep partisan divide that Republicans have spent the better part of the last four years trying to undo. They have also tried on and off since 2020 to persuade Trump himself to embrace early voting.

He thinks this will help him nationally. I have no idea which genius gave Trump this idea. From a broader perspective, it’s true that the GOP will lose if everyone votes, but that’s not going to happen in the United States; it’s a hypothetical scenario. The reality is that when voting becomes easier, more people participate.

The demographic that truly loves mail-in voting is seniors — a group that often strongly favors the Republican Party. In 2020, Trump won the 50–64 age group by 6 points and the 65-and-over group by 4 points. By attacking early voting and mail-in voting, Donald Trump will end up reducing turnout among seniors.

How much is anyone’s guess, but a loss of ten thousand votes here and twenty thousand there could have swung the results in battleground states. Instead of calling Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and asking him to “find 11,780 votes”, Trump could have supported mail-in voting and instructed the RNC to find 20,000 seniors to mail in their ballots.

But that’s the problem with men who fall in love with shortcuts: they don’t want to do the hard work; they just want to cheat.

Early voting in the United States has begun, and thanks to Donald Trump’s relentless attacks, Democrats are starting to take the lead.

The total number of mail ballots requested stands at 38 million. It’s October 7th, and we’re just about halfway to the 2020 numbers, which were 92 million mail ballots requested. This is promising because people preferred mail ballots in 2020 due to COVID and the desire to avoid human contact. I think in-person early voting numbers will be a better indicator this year for predicting turnout.

Regardless, Donald Trump is going to hurt himself and the Republican Party in battleground states with his rhetoric against early voting and mail ballots. He’s doing this as one way to amplify his election conspiracy theories, file baseless lawsuits, use those court cases to seek fake electors, and then use the fake electors to throw the election to the House — keeping that backup option ready in case of a loss. He tried this last time and failed. He’s going to fail again.

However, the issue is that he won’t just shave a few percentage points off his own votes in battleground states; he will do the same for down-ballot GOP candidates.

That’s the price the GOP has to pay for letting Trump stay at the top. It was a mistake Mitch McConnell and establishment Republicans made after January 6th. Instead of knocking him out, they protected him.

Insurrection should be the end of anyone’s political career, yet they didn’t act. A loss in 2024 is the price they must pay for that mistake.

They should have asked themselves, "What would we do if a Democratic politician caused an insurrection?" Instead, they chose to do what was politically convenient for them.

Four years later, Donald Trump is doing what is politically convenient for him. GOP deserves every bit of trouble Donald Trump is causing them.