Trump’s Favorite Voter-ID Bill Would Probably Backfire

On the surface, the debate over the SAVE America Act is familiar, even predictable. At Donald Trump’s urging, Republicans are pushing yet another voter-ID bill, ostensibly to prevent fraud and noncitizen voting. Democrats are opposing the bill on the grounds that voter fraud is negligible and that the law is really meant to disenfranchise their supporters.

But upon closer inspection, something very strange is going on. For decades, the politics of voter-ID battles were based on a simple premise: The voters most likely to be screened out by such restrictions were probably Democrats. In 2024, however, that fact stopped being true. Trump beat Kamala Harris among voters who didn’t regularly participate in elections. In the low-turnout, off-cycle elections that have happened since then, Democrats have overperformed dramatically, suggesting that their advantage with the most educated, plugged-in voters remains strong. In other words, the politics of voter ID have not caught up to its new partisan implications. Making voting more difficult would most likely hurt Republicans’ chances, yet they’re pushing hard to make that happen; meanwhile, Democrats, who insist that Trump and a MAGA Congress are existential threats to American democracy, refuse on principle to help Republicans sabotage themselves.

The world is different from how it used to be, and the electorate is different too. The debate over the SAVE America Act suggests that some of the last people to realize that fact are the people whose job most depends on it.

In the fall of 1998, Democratic volunteers greeted Black churchgoers in New York as they headed into prayer, handing each congregant a leaflet that read, “When We Vote, We Win.” The slogan crystallized what had become conventional wisdom: Higher turnout helps Democrats, the party of the downtrodden. The Democratic coalition was disproportionately young, lower-income, less educated, and nonwhite—all demographics that were less likely to vote and more likely to be prevented from doing so if friction was added to the voting process. Republican voters were whiter, older, and richer, and thus more likely to vote and to jump through hoops to do so. This reality motivated Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts for decades. If you were a Democrat, you wanted to get people to vote; it was a civic good that featured a nice bonus of helping your team win.

Republicans, rather than take the position that voting is bad, found a countervailing civic good of their own: election integrity. In 2005, Indiana passed a restrictive voter-ID law, which was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2008. More states soon followed. By all indications, these laws were addressing a fake problem: Voter fraud, in which one person casts a vote on behalf of someone else, almost never happens. Republican officials occasionally let slip that their motivations were not wholly pure. In 2012, for example, a state lawmaker boasted that Pennsylvania’s new voter-ID requirements would allow Mitt Romney to win the state. (The law was blocked from taking effect that year and eventually ruled unconstitutional. Pennsylvania went for Barack Obama.)

The basic trend held up year after year. In 2016, according to the Democratic-aligned data firm Catalist, Trump won a majority of voters who had voted in the previous four cycles, but lost with everyone else. He repeated that performance in 2020, although the difference between frequent and infrequent voters became less stark. Kamala Harris, accordingly, held “When we vote, we win” rallies in 2024.

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But that November, the pattern flipped. Trump won the popular vote for the first time and, according to multiple analyses, did better with sporadic voters than with consistent voters. Harris won educated voters, rich voters, and well-informed voters, and her coalition was whiter than Joe Biden’s had been. Trump got the downtrodden. Some of the biggest shifts in his direction were among young people, Latinos, and immigrants. The Democratic analyst David Shor has found that Democrats dominated in 2024 with voters whose political identity was very important to them. If every eligible voter had voted, Shor concluded, Trump would have won by five points instead of one and a half.

Since 2024, Democrats have run up the score in special elections, when highly engaged voters dominate the electorate. Savvy politics-watchers have started to take note. In August, the liberal Substack author Matt Yglesias wrote a post titled “When People Don’t Vote, Democrats Win.” Zachary Donnini, the head of data science at VoteHub, told me, “In the ideal world for Democrats, elections are held where you have to drive eight hours across the country on a snowy Wednesday. That’s when Democrats do the best.” A co-founder of one liberal PAC changed his X bio to “Voter-ID Democrat.” Another liberal account posted, “You should need a passport AND a ski lift ticket to vote.”

Politicians seem to be further behind. Republicans’ current voter-ID push seems almost custom-designed to disenfranchise their own voters. Many versions of the bill have floated around Congress lately, but the one that finally passed the House earlier this month requires not just voter ID to be shown when voting in person (or a copy to be included when voting by mail), but proof of citizenship when registering to vote. This is a high bar. Only half of Americans own a passport, and only five states issue IDs that prove citizenship. Everyone else would need an American birth certificate and a matching ID or a certificate of naturalization. Married women (who broke for Trump in 2024) whose last name no longer matches their documentation (who lean more conservative on average than women who keep their last name) would need to add proof of name change.

And it is a bar that Democratic voters would have a much easier time clearing. One recent YouGov poll showed that 64 percent of Harris voters reported having a valid passport compared with 55 percent of Trump voters. According to an analysis by the voting-rights nonprofit Secure Democracy USA, the 13 states in which people are least likely to have a passport voted for Trump in 2024. Passports are especially rare in rural counties, where Republicans run up the score, Daniel Griffith, the author of the report, told me.

Barring some abrupt realignment between now and November, the bill, if passed, would be likely to drive Republicans away from the polls. Yet elected officials appear to believe the exact opposite. Republican Representative Buddy Carter of Georgia said on the House floor that Democrats “oppose this bill because it chips away at their voting base.” During his State of the Union address this week, Trump argued that Democrats don’t support the bill, because “their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat.” At a news conference hyping the bill, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem declared, “We’ve been proactive to make sure that we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead this country.”

One possibility is that Republican legislators genuinely don’t realize that the law could disenfranchise more of their voters than the other side’s. Maybe they think the coalitions haven’t changed much since 2016, or perhaps they sincerely believe the Trump-era dogma that illegal immigrants and fraudsters are voting en masse and casting their ballots for Democrats.

Representative Andy Harris of Maryland, the chair of the House Freedom Caucus, told me that his support for the SAVE America Act had nothing to do with “whether it hurts or helps any party.” He also noted that voter-ID requirements are popular, and that “we have no idea” how common noncitizen voting or fraud currently is. He has a point: It is theoretically possible that the conservative Heritage Foundation’s database of 1,620 incidences of fraud since 1982 is wildly incomplete. Harris is also right that the policy polls well. David Shor’s data firm, Blue Rose Research, found last year that requiring IDs and proof of citizenship to vote was one of the most popular policy proposals out of a list of 190 that they polled.

And whether it helps Democrats or Republicans doesn’t really matter—because the bill isn’t going to be passed. Republicans know that Democrats will filibuster. This allows them to take a public stand that voters agree with and that helps bolster their law-and-order image.

A similar dynamic is playing out on the Democratic side of the aisle, but in reverse. Democrats, accustomed to rallying against efforts to suppress turnout among their voters, have slipped seamlessly back into that familiar groove. “The only hope that Republicans have of holding on to power this November is to rig the election before it even starts,” Senator Alex Padilla of California told me. This seems to be the party line. “The act is all about rigging elections for the Republican Party,” Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon told me. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has gone so far as to describe the bill as “federalizing Jim Crow.”

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Democratic rhetoric on voter-ID laws has always been overheated. Academic research tends to find very small effects on turnout, concentrated among those who don’t have ID and were unlikely to vote anyway, and with no consistent partisan valence due in part to the mobilization efforts that often emerge in response. New Hampshire and Arizona require proof of citizenship when registering to vote. Election-day voter-ID requirements, even when voting by mail, are in effect in Arkansas and North Carolina. Even if such laws do screen out some less-engaged voters, to say that these states have been “rigged” into Republican rule would be absurd. New Hampshire has voted for a Democrat for president in every election since 2004. Arizona’s governor and both of its U.S. senators are Democrats. Now the rhetoric is not merely exaggerated but also, when it comes to the likely electoral consequences of the SAVE America Act, backward.

Of course, Democrats have another reason to oppose the bill: principle. Merkley, for example, told me that it’s “very unlikely” the bill would help Democrats, but that, even if it did, he would oppose it because “every citizen should have an appropriate opportunity to participate in elections, regardless of who benefits.”

Even at a moment in which Democrats have embraced hyperaggressive partisan gerrymandering, actually supporting legislation that might prevent eligible voters from casting a ballot may be a line they still won’t cross. Their party has been focused on expanding access to voting since the civil-rights era. If they go back on that now for a small electoral advantage, what principle is left to stand on?

Moreover, as the recent paradigm shift shows, changes to electoral coalitions can be fast and unpredictable. Democrats won with low-propensity voters until very recently. Members of Congress, who mostly occupy safe seats and came of age during a bygone political era, may feel that any shift toward Republicans will be short-lived.

Some evidence suggests that the least-engaged voters are beginning to drift back to the left. CNN recently reported that people who didn’t vote in 2024 said they plan to vote for Democratic congressional candidates by a 16-point margin in the upcoming midterms. The pollster G. Elliott Morris recently published a survey showing that voters who didn’t know which party controls the House or Senate—a metric of political disengagement—disapproved of Trump by a margin of 13 points. (Voters who did know the state of partisan politics disapproved of Trump even more.)

The general trend of midterm-year polling shows that Black voters, Latino voters, and young voters, all of whom swung to Trump in 2024, are now swinging away from him. Even so, the Democratic base remains disproportionately well educated and politically engaged. Any change to election procedures that increases this demographic’s share of the electorate would likely give Democrats an edge—one that, given the extremely unfavorable realities of the Senate map, they could sorely use. “It’d be a big irony if that was the case,” Merkley said. He was talking about the Democrats whipping against a bill that would help their chances while Republicans line up to support it. An even bigger irony is that the very people whose job is to understand the electorate don’t seem to understand it at all.