Every state that relies heavily on voting by mail outperformed the national median during the 2022 primaries – but none of them led in turnout this year. That distinction went to Wyoming, where Rep. Liz Cheney ran in a statewide nominating contest, and Kansas, which put an abortion measure on the primary ballot.
But the seven states that do run vote-by-mail primaries were all in the top 20 – including four of the top seven – according to data collected by the National Vote at Home Institute.
“Voting by mailed-out ballots has lifted primary turnout in states by 5 to 15 percentage points,” said Gerry Langeler, director of research for NVAHI. “And given that primaries often show turnout percentages in the teens or 20s, that can amount to a 25 percent to 50 percent relative lift.”
While making it easier to vote appears to be a significant driver of higher turnout, there are individual contests that can motivate people to vote at an even higher rate.
Cheney, the sole House member from Wyoming, had been a reliable supporter of conservative causes who voted with her party and Donald Trump on nearly every issue. And she had been the third-ranking Republican in the House until being forced from the post because she defended the results of the 2020 election and blamed Trump for the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.
She then agreed to serve as the top Republican on the committee investigating the insurrection, further cementing herself as an outcast in a party still heavily backing Trump. The three-term lawmaker easily won the nomination in 2018 and 2020 with about 75,000 votes each time. This year, she lost the primary to Harriet Hageman, who got more than 113,000 votes – as turnout soared to 63 percent in Wyoming, up from 52 percent in the 2018 midterm.
While the state does not have a full vote-by-mail system, it does allow anyone to use an absentee ballot and runs an open primary.
Legislators in Kansas had placed a proposed constitutional amendment banning the right to an abortion on the primary ballot, rather than November’s general election ballot. Opponents accused lawmakers of scheduling it that way to take advantage of low voter turnout. But abortion rights supporters were motivated to vote and decisively defeated the amendemnt.
In 2018, the previous midterm election, 27 percent of registered voters cast a ballot in the Kansas primary. This year, turnout hit 48 percent.
After Wyoming and Kansas, four of the next five highest turnout states all conduct vote-by-mail elections. Forty percent of registered voters Washington and Hawaii participated in those states' primaries this year.
They were followed by Oregon (38 percent) and Utah (37 percent), which unlike the others do not have open primaries. Sandwiched in between those pairs was Montana, which has an open primary and no-excuse absentee voting. Montana also allows people to request to permanently receive their ballots by mail.
According to NVAHI, turnout among mail voters in Montana was 55 percent, but only 12 percent among in-person voters.
Four other states and the nation’s capital conducted vote-by-mail primaries. (Vermont only uses a full vote-by-mail system for general elections.):
- California (33 percent).
- Colorado (32 percent).
- Washington, D.C. (32 percent).
- Alaska’s special election for its vacant House seat (28 percent). Turnout for the regular primary, which was not all run by mail, was 32 percent.
- Nevada (26 percent).
Even though Nevada trailed the others, it still surpassed the national median of 25 percent turnout.
“The turnout in Nevada displays the same thing we saw in Wyoming, but in reverse. Primary turnout still has a major component on ‘how hot are the local races’ in it. Wyoming led the nation in 2022 primary turnout due to the Liz Cheney ‘referendum,’ even without the benefit of mailed-out ballots,” Langeler said. “Nevada voters simply were not that engaged in their primary, but even as the lowest of the vote-at-home states, Nevada beat the national turnout average.”
Efforts are underway by advocates to further expand voting by mail. The D.C. City Council is considering a bill this week to make permanent its temporary move to vote by mail.
Langeler identified a number of states that may expand the use of permanent absentee voting (also known as “single sign-up”). Michigan has a ballot measure to that effect on the November ballot. New Mexico and Maine may revise their systems. And in Connecticut, lawmakers are expected to vote on switching to no-excuse absentee voting.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.