This article was originally published on Forbes.com on August 31, 2020.
In early spring, President Trump began warning us that the U.S. Postal Service may not be able to manage the flood of anticipated ballots this November.
Then last month, general counsel for the USPS, Thomas J. Marshall, went so far as to write a letter to all 50 states, informing them of concerns over the service’s ability to meet historical deadlines for ballots submitted by mail. In response, the House of Representatives passed a modest bill that gave the USPS $25 billion in additional funding and asked that any cost cutting — like reducing hours of service, worker overtime or changing operational procedures — be postponed until after the election.
Now the GOP is telling us that the concerns are all a hoax by the Democrats, and Sen. Mitch McConnell has said he won’t even allow the bill to be voted on. Huh? President Trump, who warned us for months that the Postal Service can’t handle the increase in volume, now tweets that the protective bill was a “money wasting HOAX.”
This kind of political spin may work with party loyalists, but it does not play well with the average rural Wisconsin voter — the type the GOP needs to win over in a few weeks. A whopping two-thirds of independent voters who have an opinion — those critical to the outcome of the 2020 election — believe that the postmaster’s cost-cutting actions were motivated by a goal to make it more difficult for Americans to vote by mail. These voters will not easily reconcile being warned for months by a Republican administration that we have a crisis on our hands, only to be told after the House offered a solution that the crisis was actually a “hoax.”
Republican leaders would be wise to note that the agency has a 91% approval rating, making it the most popular federal agency in the nation. Believe it or not, the Postal Service is rated the most trusted brand in America, beating out institutions such as Cheerios, Hershey, Tide … and my personal favorite: Chick-fil-A.
Because of the pandemic, roughly 80 million Americans are expected to vote using the mail in 2020, most of them through the non-controversial method of absentee ballots — just like Donald Trump will do with his own Florida absentee ballot. These are voters that include welders in rural Michigan, farmers in Iowa and ranchers in Wyoming — voters the Republican Party needs not just in a few weeks, but in the years to come.
This is the wrong hill for the Republican Party to die on if our members care about our long-term standing among independent voters. It’s especially bad for red states like my own, Wyoming, as we find ourselves increasingly dependent on a single political party that may be shooting itself in the foot a few weeks before Americans vote. If the GOP fails to support protective legislation that has no negative consequences beyond delaying some cost cutting at the Postal Service by a few weeks, and the election results are followed by litigation due to failures to deliver absentee ballots on time, the Republican Party — and states like Wyoming as a result — will pay a price well past November 2020.