President Donald Trump and his MAGA agenda are not shy when it comes to bending conservative norms. In his second term, states’ rights, once a rallying cry for conservatives, are under pressure. Trump has strong-armed private companies and universities, and is putting pressure on state election authorities. This Washington Examiner series, Upend the Orthodoxy, will take an in-depth look at all of these.
State Republicans aren’t shying away from mail-in voting despite President Donald Trump‘s pledge to lead a “movement” against them last month.
In the weeks since Trump teased an executive order to end the practice nationwide, GOP officials have signaled the party will continue to rely on mail ballots after embracing the voting method in 2024.
Pennsylvania GOP spokesman James Markley told the Washington Examiner in a statement that the party plans to use “all legal voting methods available to them” to win seats.
A state North Carolina GOP official similarly expressed that “the position that we always take from the state party perspective is the policy makers make those decisions, and our job is to win those elections, and so we’re prepared to do that.”
The GOP’s embrace of mail-in voting is based, in part, on how widespread the practice has become since the pandemic. In Pennsylvania, 33% of Republicans voted by mail in 2024, compared to 24% in 2020, according to data from the Election Lab at the University of Florida.
Nationwide, over 30% of votes were cast in the 2024 presidential election through mail-in ballots, according to the United States Election Assistance Commission.
And despite Trump’s call for Republicans to end the practice, Republicans are limited in what they can do unilaterally. Republicans hold 28 state legislatures while Democrats hold 18, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Three states, Minnesota, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, have divided legislatures.
The popularity of mail voting led Republicans to make a wholesale reevaluation of the practice in 2024, with even Trump encouraging voters to cast their ballots however they can. State parties followed suit, helping propel Republicans to unified control of Washington in November.
But Trump, who has long claimed election fraud cost him the 2020 election, has once again soured on mail ballots, putting GOP state officials in a rare spot of disagreement with the White House. Some Republicans, including the secretaries of state for Wyoming and Arkansas, expressed support for restricting mail voting after Trump called for its elimination, but others, like New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan, have criticized the proposal.
Former Colorado GOP chairman Dick Wadhams disagreed with Trump and found his comments “ironic” given the Republican National Committee’s spending to promote mail-in ballots last cycle.
Colorado automatically sends every registered voter a mail-in ballot, which Trump recently criticized during his announcement that he was moving the U.S. Space Command Headquarters from the state to Alabama.
“The problem I had with Colorado, one of the big problems, they do mail-in voting,” Trump said earlier this month, stating that the state’s use of mail-in voting was a “factor” in the decision to move the headquarters.
“So they have automatically crooked elections,” he said.
Wadhams explained that the state legislature voted to send ballots to every voter in 2013 because the “vast majority of Colorado voters” were already signed up to receive mail-in ballots.
“The whole process of having polling sites staffed by election judges just wasn’t practical, or financially feasible, because hardly anybody was voting at those sites because they were getting absentee ballots, Wadhams said. “They were proactively asking for those absentee ballots. They weren’t, they were not, imposed on voters.”
“In my opinion, there is no doubt the Colorado all-mail balloting process is safe,” Wadhams added.
Trump’s pressure campaign against mail-in voting comes amid a nationwide redistricting war between Republicans and Democrats that could shift the makeup of Congress. Trump has heavily pushed for GOP-led states to make their 2026 maps more favorable as Republicans seek to hold on to their House majority in the midterm elections, sparking Democrats to counter with their own redistricting plans.
But Trump described his push to ban mail-in ballots as “bigger than anything having to do with redistricting.”
“We got to stop mail-in voting, and the Republicans have to lead the charge,” Trump told reporters during an Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Aug. 18.
Trump also said his lawyers were writing an executive order to end mail-in ballots. Election laws are set at the state level, meaning that any order from the president seeking to end the voting option would likely be met with legal challenges.
When asked by a reporter for more details about how Trump planned to ban mail-in ballots, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the administration planned to work with Republicans on Capitol Hill and in state legislatures.
However, the president’s criticism of mail-in ballots could risk disrupting the inroads Republicans made with voters last cycle, with the party spending millions promoting mail-in ballots ahead of the 2024 election.
A GOP operative, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the situation, told the Washington Examiner that the call to action from the president “was a little surprising” and “pretty counterproductive to what Republicans have been working really hard for over the past couple of years.”
“The Republican ecosystem has worked really hard to close the gap on mail-in voting over the past couple of years,” the GOP operative said. “And I think it’s a really important operation that we’ve been doing, and I know we definitely want to continue those efforts. And so anything to kind of get rid of those efforts will be pretty detrimental for Republicans.”
RNC National press secretary Kiersten Pels told the Washington Examiner that the party would be “ready to help implement any and all changes made to our nation’s election laws by the President and Congress.”
“President Trump is absolutely right, we need safe and secure elections,” Pels said. “The Republican Election Integrity motto is simple: we want to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat.”
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Meanwhile, Democrats are planning on “fighting back on every front, every step of the way,” Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesperson Viet Shelton said in a statement.
“With costs rising on everything and a cratering job market, House Republicans and Trump realize they have no path to holding onto the majority in a free and fair election,” Shelton said. “They’ve resorted to a desperate plot to try and rig the midterms before a single vote is cast, but we know the public hates politicians who try to overrule the will of the voters.”