Americans are definitely not on board with Donald Trump and Louis DeJoy’s sabotage campaign against the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), a new poll finds. The big public rationale for installing DeJoy as postmaster general was that he was an experienced businessman who would introduce business-style efficiencies to the Postal Service. But 66% of people told the Washington Post-University of Maryland poll that the Postal Service “should be run like a public service, even if that costs the government money,” while just 32% said: “It should be run like a business, even if that limits the services it provides.”
The Postal Service still gets high marks, with 72% giving it a positive rating for the job it does and 67% saying they were confident it would deliver mail-in ballots “in a timely manner.” And people are noticing Trump’s campaign against vote-by-mail and the USPS: 53% said they were very or somewhat concerned “that President Trump will try to prevent eligible voters from casting ballots in this fall’s presidential election,” and 57% said Trump’s criticisms of mail-in voting were “mainly trying to stop people from voting against him.”
Just over half of people polled said their mail is taking longer to arrive in recent months—i.e., since DeJoy took over—and 83% said the USPS should continue to prioritize delivering ballots over other types of mail. As you’d expect, there was a partisan split in answers to many of the questions about the Postal Service and voting, but not on that last point. And even 49% of Republicans said the Postal Service should be run as a public service, not like a business.
The Trump-DeJoy attacks on the USPS are not what Americans want. They’re what Trump thinks he needs to “win,” or at least to muddy the waters about his loss in November. Now we need to make sure that voters take it to the next step and see and understand what Trump is doing when the direct sabotage isn’t enough and he moves on to trying to delegitimize or overturn election results.
Posted with permission from Daily Kos.
