Trump Wants to Kill Mail Voting. Pennsylvania Republicans Are Begging Their Voters to Use It Anyway.
Donald Trump is once again demanding an end to mail voting nationwide, declaring he’ll “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS.” But in Pennsylvania, Republican officials are doing the opposite — urging their own voters to sign up for the very system their party leader claims is corrupt.
The mixed messaging has created a full-blown identity crisis inside the GOP. As Trump attacks mail voting as fraudulent, state Republican groups, conservative activists, and local party chairs are sending out glossy ads telling voters to request mail ballots “today.” One Republican mailer even bragged, “In 2024, we voted by mail and flipped Pennsylvania red,” while linking supporters directly to the state’s ballot request portal.
GOP strategists admit the contradiction is confusing their base. Years of Trump-inspired conspiracy theories trained Republican voters to distrust mail voting, and the party is now scrambling to walk that back because they can’t win statewide without it. After losing his 2022 governor’s race by double digits, far-right state Sen. Doug Mastriano bluntly said Republicans “have to embrace no-excuse mail voting.” Even Donald Trump Jr. cut ads last year telling voters to sign up for mail ballots.
But the old messaging hasn’t gone away. Trump still rails against mail voting as rigged, and county GOP chairs like Berks County’s Jim Billman openly say they want to eliminate the system entirely — even as they urge their voters to use it for now because Democrats are “running circles around them.”
The result is a Republican Party at war with itself: candidates telling voters the system is corrupt, consultants begging them to use it, national figures denouncing mail ballots as illegitimate, and state operatives treating mail voting as their only path to competitiveness.
Inside the GOP, no one seems to agree on whether mail voting is a threat to democracy or the key to saving their electoral chances. What Pennsylvania Republicans do agree on is that if they don’t convince their base to ignore Trump’s warnings, they’re going to keep losing — even if it means campaigning on a system they spent years calling a fraud.
