Democrats Shift From Mail-In Ballots in Midterms
Left 100%
Center 0%
Right 0%
2 left · 0 center · 0 right
What happened
An NBC News poll of 1,000 registered voters, conducted September 11–15 by Hart Research Associates and Public Opinion Strategies using telephone interviews and an online survey via text message (margin of error plus or minus 3.1 percentage points), found that 23 percent of registered Democrats plan to vote by mail in the 2026 midterms, down from 34 percent in mid-September 2024. Thirty-six percent of Democrats said they plan to vote in person at an early voting site, up 6 points from a similar point two years earlier; another 36 percent plan to vote in person on Election Day, roughly unchanged from 2024; and 5 percent were unsure or unlikely to vote. Independent planned mail voting fell to 25 percent from 28 percent, while Republican preferences were virtually unchanged at 16 percent mail, 26 percent early in person, and 53 percent Election Day. On the evening of September 14, during the poll’s field period, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked a President Donald Trump executive order that sought to impose new criteria for states to send out mail ballots for the midterms. Democrat pollster Jeff Horwitt, whose firm co-conducted the survey, said Democrats have a 23-point advantage on the congressional ballot among early voters and Republicans have a 14-point advantage among Election Day voters.
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1 of 2 articles cite a named source for the story. It was on the record from the first report.
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Omitted — what each side leaves out
Unpacked
Left-leaning coverage never reports how many Democrats still plan to vote by mail, the number that would show whether they are actually ditching that method. Readers of The Hill learn only of a six-point rise in early in-person voting. Right-leaning coverage is simply more complete: it states that 23 percent of Democrats now say they will vote by mail. That is down from 34 percent two years earlier. Without the decline, the story reads as a modest early-voting bump rather than Democrats walking away from mail ballots.
Left-leaning coverage casts Trump's pressure as "attacks" on mail-in ballots. Right-leaning coverage describes the same stance as a wish to end the practice.
Did the poll ask any Democrat why they were dropping mail-in ballots?
Bottom line
Read The Hill and the NBC poll is an early-voting uptick; the 23 percent mail-in share appears only in Breitbart.
The Left View
The Hill frames Democrats’ reduced plans to use mail ballots as occurring “as President Trump ramps up his attacks on casting mail-in ballots,” and highlights the corresponding rise in Democrats intending to vote in person at early-voting sites. Its account centers that Trump-attacks context rather than independent or Republican method trends or the early-versus-Election Day split on the congressional ballot.
The Right View
Breitbart presents Democrats as planning to “ditch” mail-in ballots and vote in person while Trump “wants to put an end to mail-in voting,” stressing that Democrats “have relied heavily on mail voting since the 2020 election, which took place during the Covid pandemic.” It adds that independents are also “starting to disfavor mail-in ballots,” that GOP voters have “remained consistent,” and quotes Horwitt that if a blue wave comes in, “it will hit land at different times, and even on different days or weeks.”
Our Take (balanced)
The left’s strongest argument is that Democrats’ move toward in-person voting is happening as Trump intensifies attacks on mail-in ballots, which The Hill treats as the relevant context for the shift. The right’s strongest argument is that Democrats are stepping back from a method they have relied on heavily since 2020, with independents also cooling on mail and Republicans remaining Election-Day dominant, while Horwitt’s documented advantages by voting window show that any Democratic wave would register unevenly over time. The central unresolved tension is whether that Democratic shift is principally a reaction to Trump’s anti-mail campaign and the mid-poll Supreme Court block of his mail-ballot executive order, or a broader change in voting habits whose impact turns on the early-versus-Election Day partisan gap.
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