Republicans Fear New Voting Restrictions Could Backfire On Their Own Voters - Rachel Maddow - MSNBC

[LetMyPeopleVote]

11. Vote by Mail had been an important part of GOP GOTV efforts for decades

I have been working on voter protection efforts for a very long time. In Texas the GOP has relied on vote by mail and for this reason vote by mail was excluded from the GOP voter suppression/voter id law. The full nasty Texas voter id/voter suppression law was only in effect for the 2014 election (Chad Dunn and Marc Veasey sued and got the law largely gutted for subsequent elections). 2014 was teh first year that the Democratic Party made a serious effort at vote by mail. In 2010, the GOP in my county the GOP had 9 to 1 advantage in straight ticket vote by mail ballots and in 2014 we cut that advantage to about 3 to 2 advantage.

A good percentage of GOP voters are older and have used vote by mail for a very long time

I a hard core Democrat but I have received vote by mail applications from GOP candidate even though I was under 65 years of age. Vote by mail has been a major element of the GOP for a long time in Texas and in other states. We actually had more vote by mail ballots in 2020

The GOP's voter suppression efforts are likely to hurt GOP turnout

Link to tweet

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n April 29, the Republican-controlled Florida State Legislature passed a voter suppression bill that, among other things, will make it more difficult to vote by mail — and Gov. Ron DeSantis has said he will sign it into law. Florida Senate Bill 90 is obviously designed to discourage Democratic voter turnout in the Sunshine State. But now, according to Washington Post reporter Amy Gardner, some Republicans fear that it will discourage their own voters.

In the past, Gardner notes, absentee voting was something that Florida Republicans encouraged.

"Republican campaigns invested millions of dollars encouraging their supporters to cast ballots by mail," Gardner points out. "State legislators passed laws making it easier. Over the ensuing decades, GOP voters in Florida became so comfortable with casting ballots by mail that in 2020, nearly 35% of those who turned out did so, according to state data compiled by University of Florida political science professor Daniel A. Smith. Virtually every narrow Republican victor of the past generation — and there have been many, including two of the state's current top officeholders, Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Rick Scott — owes their victory, at least in part, to mail voting."

It wasn't until 2020 that Florida Republicans started to turn against mail-in voting in a big way. Then-President Donald Trump claimed, with zero evidence, that voting by mail encouraged voter fraud — and many Florida Republicans, including those in the state legislature, obediently went along with his claim.