Donald Trump has an uncanny ability to make arguments that come back to bite him years later in a particularly personal way: the Electoral College is bad, presidents shouldn’t play too much golf, parents of immigrants shouldn’t be given visas.
Here’s another one for the list: People with felony convictions shouldn’t be allowed to vote.
Now that Trump has been found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, his old arguments against allowing felons to cast a ballot have not aged well, even though he’ll most likely still be able to vote in November. As the joke went during his administration: There’s always a tweet.
McAuliffe argued he was righting a historic wrong; Trump claimed it was ‘crooked politics’ to sway the election.
This issue first arose in 2016 when Virginia’s then-Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime friend of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, began a massive effort to restore voting rights to tens of thousands of Virginians who had served their sentences and parole or probation after a felony conviction in the commonwealth. McAuliffe argued he was righting a historic wrong; Trump claimed it was “crooked politics” to sway the election.
“Hillary Clinton is banking on her friend Terry McAuliffe on getting thousands of violent felons to the voting booths in an effort to cancel out the votes of both law enforcement and crime victims,” Trump said at a rally in August 2016, stirring the crowd into booing. “They are letting people vote in your Virginia election that should not be allowed to vote. Sad. So Sad.”
Trump’s logic was that McAuliffe was restoring the rights of “people that have been convicted of heinous crimes” because he knew “they’re gonna vote Democrat.” But Trump wasn’t the only Republican making that claim. That same year, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton argued that voting rights restoration was being pushed by “erstwhile political operatives for the electoral benefit of their political paymasters.” And the previous year, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz was even more direct, claiming that Democrats “know that convicted felons tend to vote Democrat.”
Clinton won Virginia by 5 points, so it was a moot issue. But studies show that people who have left prison — when they even know they’re eligible to vote again and bother to cast a ballot — tend to vote the same as people within their same demographic groups who haven’t been to prison.
And while Democratic-leaning Black Americans are overrepresented in prison, people who have been convicted of a felony, on the whole, are overwhelmingly male and non-college educated and largely white — all groups that are increasingly likely to vote Republican, especially for Trump. A first-of-its-kind survey in 2020 even found white people in prison at the time backed Trump over a Democratic candidate by about 15 points.
Polls show voters are largely supportive of restoring voting rights for people who have served their felony sentences, and a number of Republican officials at the state level have backed these reforms. Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, who endorsed Trump this year, signed an executive order in 2020 restoring voting rights and proposed amending the state constitution to make that automatic in the future.
But Trump helped hold the party back on the issue. When Democrats included a measure to re-enfranchise people who have served their sentences in their doomed voting reform legislation in 2019, it became a GOP line of attack. Trump cited the provision, calling the bill a “monster.” Tennessee Sen. Bill Hagerty said the provision would incentivize “dangerous behavior.” Even Indiana Sen. Todd Young — whose home state already automatically restores voting rights to inmates when they leave prison — included it in his criticism of the bill.
And when nearly two-thirds of Florida voters passed a ballot measure to restore voting rights to those who have completed their sentences (other than those convicted of murder or sexual offenses), Gov. Ron DeSantis and state legislators put up roadblocks to the process by making it hard for them to pay off any fees and fines still owed. In an interview, Trump argued that the real crime was helping former felons get back the right to vote. Then, when former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg raised money to help those Floridians pay off their fines, Trump argued that the real crime was helping them get back the right to vote. “It’s a felony,” he told Fox News Radio, using the kind of wildly inaccurate rhetoric that gives fact-checkers headaches. “He’s actually giving money to people. He’s paying people to vote. He’s actually saying, ‘Here’s money, now you go ahead and vote for only Democrats.’ Right?” Now that Trump has been convicted of felonies, he’ll almost certainly find some way to dodge his past rhetoric on the issue. He may argue that he only meant those convicted of violent felonies or that his convictions shouldn’t count because they are on appeal, or that his sentence hasn’t started yet, or that his convictions were politically motivated. But faced with the question of whether other people with felony convictions should be able to vote in the past, he never made any of those exceptions. If Trump had his way, he wouldn’t be able to vote.
Ryan Teague Beckwith is a newsletter editor for MS NOW. He has previously worked for such outlets as Time magazine and Bloomberg News. He teaches journalism at Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies and is the creator of Your First Byline. 
