The polling on voter ID has reached a point where the Democratic opposition to it defies any rational political explanation. Eighty-three percent of all Americans support requiring photo ID to register to vote. Eighty-four percent support it in Gallup’s survey. Sixty-seven percent of Democrats support it. And now — the number that should end the Jim Crow argument permanently — sixty-six percent of self-described socialists support it.
Sixty-six percent of people who call themselves socialists support the policy that Chuck Schumer calls “Jim Crow 2.0.”
Let that sink in for a moment. The senator from New York has staked his entire opposition to the SAVE America Act on the premise that requiring photo ID to register and vote is a form of racial oppression so severe it invokes the worst chapter of American history. And the people who agree with him most closely on economic policy — people who call themselves socialists — support the measure anyway, by a two-thirds majority.
The “Jim Crow” argument was always dishonest. It is now also demonstrably incoherent. You cannot maintain that a policy is so racially discriminatory it recalls segregation-era voter suppression when the demographic groups you claim it would harm — Black voters, Hispanic voters, voters under 30 — all support it in poll after poll. You cannot call it racist when CNN’s own Harry Enten has explained on live television that the data simply doesn’t back the claim. You cannot call it Jim Crow when 66% of socialists are on board with it.
What Democrats in Congress are doing is not principled civil rights advocacy. It is a calculated protection of a system they believe benefits them electorally — a system where voter rolls contain tens of thousands of noncitizens in states that refuse to verify eligibility, where ballots go out to addresses that haven’t been verified, and where the answer to every question about election integrity is “voter suppression.” The goal isn’t protecting minority voters. The goal is protecting ambiguity.
The Senate has 52 Republican votes (it would be 53 but no one’s seen Mitch McConnell in six weeks). The SAVE America Act passed the House unanimously among Republicans. The public supports it by historic margins across every demographic group. And it is sitting dead in the Senate because John Thune won’t touch the filibuster that Democrats have already promised to eliminate the moment they take back power.
Here’s the most clarifying data point in this entire debate: if 66% of self-described socialists support voter ID, the argument that it’s a right-wing plot to suppress minority votes has officially collapsed under the weight of its own implausibility.
The only people left making that argument with a straight face are Democratic senators who need to keep cheating in order to win elections.
