The Democrats Face Their Own Early-Voting Paranoia Problem

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, October 01, 2026

 

In some states, early voting in the 2026 midterm elections has already begun. Many more will follow as this campaign cycle enters the home stretch. That should be good news for Democrats — not just because the prevailing political environment favors the opposition party but because Democrats have recently voted early in larger numbers than their Republican counterparts. By most accounts, Democratic voters are still expected to swamp the GOP in the early and absentee vote, but perhaps not by the margins the party expects.

 

Politico reported on Thursday that a recent NBC News poll finding, in which fewer Democrats said they plan to vote by mail, has led to an outbreak of anxiety inside the party. As the party’s political professionals understand it, the problem is that many in the Democratic base do not believe that mail-in voting is secure against the prospect of presidential interference. Of course, Politico affirms, that’s Trump’s fault.

 

“That confusion comes as Democrats and voting groups weigh how to reassure voters after Trump’s latest effort to restrict mail voting,” the report read, referring to the president’s efforts to impose restrictions on mail-in voting, which the Supreme Court rejected. Generally, the rules at the state level — where elections are conducted — have not changed since 2024. But Democratic voters don’t believe that. As a result, “Democrats, including state election officials who oversee the process, are also looking for ways to boost confidence in the mail system,” Politico concluded.

 

It’s going to take many confidence-building measures before Democratic voters forget about Trump’s threat to the integrity of their ballots. After all, Democratic lawmakers were sounding the alarm themselves.

 

“Everyone can feel just how afraid Donald Trump and Republicans are of losing the upcoming elections by how hard they are pushing their radical and illegal voter suppression policies,” Chuck Schumer said in an April statement following the president’s March executive order and despite its dubious prospects before the courts. “This Executive Order attacking mail-in voting is just the latest in a series of frantic efforts by Donald Trump to rig elections for Republicans by trying to change the rules.” Even after the highest court in the land scuttled Trump’s initiative, Schumer still warned that the president is out to “hijack the election and poison our democracy.”

 

The rest of his party showed similar contempt for circumspection. Along with Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries accused the president of “desperately trying to rig our elections by making it harder to vote for seniors, Americans with disabilities, members of the military, rural communities and other working families who rely on vote-by-mail.”

 

The fourth-ranking official in the Democratic House caucus’s leadership, Representative Joe Neguse (Colo.), alleged that Trump deliberately sought to “disenfranchise millions of Americans, silencing an untold number of citizens that rely on mail ballots to make their voices heard.”

 

Representative Robert Garcia (Calif.), the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, claimed that the administration’s “reckless actions undermine the foundation of our nation’s democracy and violate the basic principle that all citizens have the right to have their vote counted.” Indeed, the White House–envisioned enterprise was “intended to fail,” according to Senator Richard Blumenthal (Conn.).

 

It’s hard to blame the rank-and-file Democrats who failed to keep up with court rulings for deferring to warnings their party’s leading representatives repeatedly issued before this year’s vote. That’s essentially what happened to the GOP after Donald Trump went to war with early voting, creating an early-voting deficit among Republican voters that his own party has tried to remedy, with varying degrees of success, despite the president’s refusal to get on board.

 

Democrats now find themselves in a similar position. By repeatedly warning that their ballots were not secure, Democrats were making a political argument against Trump that is set to cause collateral damage to their party’s participation in early balloting. They probably should have seen that coming.