How postal votes could deliver Donald Trump the White House

Watch or attend one of Donald Trump’s rallies, and you may well see something surprising: an electronic billboard encouraging people to vote by post. It’s a big u-turn for Trump, who has spent years maintaining that postal votes are manipulated.

Ahead of the 2020 election – which took place in the pre-vaccine era of the pandemic – Trump’s White House even blocked additional funding for the Postal Service, fearing that Democratic voters were more likely to avoid going to a polling station. Following the election, one of his many claims of voter fraud was predicated on supposedly corrupted postal ballots.

So why the sudden endorsement of postal voting? The answer is simple: although Trump remains personally sceptical, his campaign have realised that, far from favouring Democrats, postal votes are essential to helping him win.

It comes down to demographics. As Trump’s campaign knows, many of his most important potential voters are white Americans without college degrees.