Republicans in key battleground states are stepping up efforts to encourage mail-in and early voting ahead of the 2026 midterms, aiming to boost turnout among their supporters even as President Donald Trump continues to press for eliminating most forms of mail balloting. Party strategists argue that embracing existing rules is essential to counter Democrats’ long-standing advantages in early voting.
Republican organizations in several competitive states are incorporating mail-in and early voting into their midterm strategies, even as Trump urges the party to move in the opposite direction, according to a recent Politico report.
In Wisconsin, the state Republican Party is preparing what officials described as a full-court press — using mailers, emails, phone banks, door knocks and digital ads — to persuade voters to sign up for mail ballots. In Michigan, the Monroe County GOP previously ran a social media campaign ahead of the fall election urging voters to use permanent absentee ballots and is planning an even larger effort for 2026, Politico reported.
Pennsylvania Republicans, who spent about $16 million in 2024 to increase the number of GOP voters using mail ballots, now regard that approach as a top priority for the next midterms. State party chair Greg Rothman told Politico: “We have to encourage people to embrace mail-in voting and early voting. That has to be a priority for us in 2026.”
At the national level, the Republican National Committee plans to build on the aggressive early and mail voting operation it ran in 2024, after initially hesitating to promote those methods earlier in Trump’s political career, according to reporting by Politico and other outlets. At the same time, the party has continued to support efforts in some states and in court to tighten rules around when mail ballots can be counted.
One GOP-aligned nonprofit active in Pennsylvania, Citizens Alliance, helped encourage Republicans to return their mail ballots in 2024 and is preparing to expand those efforts in the run-up to the midterms. Politico reports that the group aims to knock on roughly 750,000 doors in 2026 to reach infrequent voters and persuade them to use mail or early voting.
Wisconsin Republican Party Chair Brian Schimming underscored the stakes of closing the gap with Democrats in early voting. “Democrats have built a pretty massive structural advantage in early voting for a long, long time. And we just can’t keep going into election night 100,000 votes down and expect to make it up in 12 hours,” he told Politico. Schimming added that treating early voting as optional, or as something only Democrats do, is a “losing gamble.”
Trump, however, has maintained a hard line against mail-in voting. He has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that it enables widespread fraud and has vowed to lead a movement to get rid of mail-in ballots. In August he said on social media that “elections can never be honest with mail in ballots,” and he has floated the idea of signing an executive order to sharply curtail the practice ahead of the 2026 midterms, an approach legal experts say would face significant constitutional hurdles.
In March 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14248, which, among other provisions, threatened states with lawsuits or potential funding consequences if they counted mail-in ballots received after Election Day. Voting-rights advocates and election-law scholars have warned that the measure could conflict with long-standing state practices that allow counting of ballots postmarked by Election Day but received later, and a series of legal challenges is working its way through the courts.
Despite pressure from Trump, many state-level Republicans say they have little choice but to operate within existing mail-voting frameworks if they want to remain competitive. Jim Runestad, a Michigan state senator who chairs the Michigan Republican Party, told Politico: “We’ll be fully engaged in early and absentee voting — we have to be. In Michigan, that’s the law of the land unless we can find a U.S. constitutional override, which I doubt that’s going to happen.”
Republican embrace of mail voting comes after years of uneven participation in the method by GOP voters, while Democrats built up a substantial edge in early and absentee voting. Public records and election analyses show that Republicans in Pennsylvania, for example, significantly increased their share of mail-ballot usage in the 2024 election compared with 2020, helping narrow a previously large Democratic advantage. Nationally, election data indicate that the share of ballots cast by mail in 2024 was lower than during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 but remained above pre-pandemic levels.
Even in states where lawmakers have pushed to restrict the counting of late-arriving mail ballots, party operatives in both parties say their immediate priority is maximizing turnout under current law rather than trying to reverse existing mail-voting systems in time for 2026. For Republicans, that has meant navigating Trump’s rhetoric while trying to rebuild trust in mail-in and early voting among their own supporters.
