President Donald Trump and the GOP are pushing as hard as they can to pass a nationwide voter restriction bill, something all but guaranteed to fail if they can't muster the votes to change Senate rules. Their bill, the SAVE America Act, would establish strict voter ID requirements nationwide, add new proof-of-citizenship rules to voter registration, and require state voter rolls to be run through a Department of Homeland Security system notorious for falsely flagging citizens as noncitizens.
Trump himself has boasted that the Republican Party will "never lose" again if the bill passes. But in reality, wrote Marc Novicoff for The Atlantic, it might have the opposite effect: the bill's requirements are so strict it would likely prevent more Republicans than Democrats from voting.
The problem, Novicoff wrote, is that over the last decade, the Democratic coalition has shifted, to the point where its voters tend to be more well-educated, wealthy, and likely to have the proper documentation — as opposed to decades ago when the reverse was true and Republicans began their crusade to restrict the vote. That pattern emerged strongly in the 2024 election between Trump and former Vice President Kamala Harris.
For one thing, said the article, the bill's reliance on passports to verify citizenship would hit Republicans hard: "64 percent of Harris voters reported having a valid passport compared with 55 percent of Trump voters," and "Passports are especially rare in rural counties, where Republicans run up the score."
In fact, even without the SAVE America Act requirements, Democrats turned out more of their voters than Republicans did, per political analyst David Shor: "If every eligible voter had voted, Shor concluded, Trump would have won by five points instead of one and a half." And these requirements would likely exacerbate this divide further.
All of this leaves a deep irony, Novicoff wrote: "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." At the end of the day, he said, "the very people whose job is to understand the electorate don't seem to understand it at all."