Trump Hates Vote-by-Mail. These Republicans Love It.

In Wisconsin’s Fond du Lac County, the local GOP chairman, Rohn Bishop, took the rare step of snapping back at the president on Twitter last week, replying to one of Trump’s all-caps diatribes about voting by mail with a rant of his own: “THERE IS NO EVIDENCE THAT MAIL IN VOTING WILL LEAD TO MASSIVE FRAUD AND ABUSE,” Bishop wrote. “IN FACT, WE MAY BE ABLE TO USE IT TO HELP OFFSET THE DEMOCRATS EARLY VOTING ADVANTAGES.”

“I kind of screamed at my computer,” Bishop told me when I reached him by phone. Mail-in voting works well in Wisconsin, he said, and helps Republicans in rural parts of the state compete with Democratic strongholds that have more resources to dedicate to in-person early voting. Because rural counties don’t open many early-voting locations, voting by mail is more important. “I just think we can use it to help [Trump] here,” Bishop said.

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In rural America, there’s a bigger risk to Trump’s attacks on mail balloting than merely annoying Republican officials. “Trump’s rhetoric may inadvertently be suppressing Republican votes,” Michael McDonald, an elections expert at the University of Florida, told me. A reluctance among GOP voters to use the system could lead to longer lines at polling sites, which in turn could discourage voter turnout in places where Trump is stronger, especially if the pandemic remains a factor in November, he explained.

The Postal Service could be another problem. Trump is opposed to efforts to shore up the beleaguered agency in preparation for a surge in mail-in ballots. But delays in mail service could disproportionately affect rural areas, especially if Republicans are simultaneously fighting changes that would relax deadlines requiring ballots to be received, and not merely postmarked, by Election Day. “More of the rural ballots are getting returned later,” McDonald said.

In Pennsylvania, more Democrats than Republicans requested absentee ballots in every county in the run-up to this week’s primary elections, and the surge of late requests prompted Governor Tom Wolf to extend the deadline for returning ballots by a week in several counties, including Philadelphia. That potential for a late surge is exactly what’s causing states—whether led by Republicans or Democrats—to prepare for the possibility of a huge demand for mail voting this fall.

And it means that GOP leaders in many of these states are telling their voters to support Trump—and also, implicitly, to ignore him. “We’re giving people the choice,” Gruters, the Florida GOP chairman, told me. “If you want to vote by mail, vote by mail.”

Russell Berman is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers politics.