While most voters believe their health will not be at risk while casting ballots in November, attitudes about the election depend greatly on political affiliation and demographic factors, a recent report found.
The study, released Thursday by the Rand Corp., details expectations among voters about public safety, election integrity and the preparedness of local officials to run the 2020 presidential election amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Most voters — 55 percent — trust that their vote will be properly counted after months of President Trump and other administration officials casting doubts on voting by mail. F
Political affiliation significantly influenced responses. Among Republicans, 86 percent feel voting will be safe from health risks, while only 54 percent of Democrats agree. Republicans were also more concerned than Democrats that their votes won't be properly counted.
Race and age also affected how people responded. White and older respondents had significantly more trust that their votes would be counted than Black, Hispanic and younger respondents. As a previous survey found, many young voters are worried about the integrity of the election. Overall, older voters — despite being at higher risk of Covid-19 infection — had more positive perceptions of election safety, integrity and preparedness.
"This might reflect the fact that, in recent decades, older Americans have generally tended to have greater trust in government institutions than younger Americans," the report concluded.
The survey also found a correlation between those who question election safety or integrity and those less likely to vote. More than seven in 10 of those who voted in 2016 or 2018 believe in the election's integrity, while just four in 10 of those who did not vote in the last two elections have that same belief.
Despite these differences, there was widespread support "for sanitation and social distancing at poll locations but lower support for sending mail-in ballots to all registered voters or using online voting."
While the number of voters casting their ballots by mail has increased steadily over the past 30 years, a large jump is expected this year due in part to the pandemic and correlated health fears. Almost half of voters plan to vote remotely, up from about a third in the last election.
The report, though, said expanding no-excuse mail-in voting as well as targeting messages at the most skeptical groups might mitigate voter concerns.
Rand surveyed more than 2,000 respondents in late May and early June across the country and considers its findings to be a snapshot in time, when the pandemic had mostly affected the Northeast and Midwest. Because of the ever-changing dynamics of the virus, current attitudes on voting could vary, the company said.
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.