Could the SAVE Act Doom... Republicans?

Three reasons Trump and Musk's election-rigging bill could backfire bigly. (And one reason it might not.)

Donald Trump and Elon Musk want to end fair and free elections in America. And they think they know how to do it.

“If we get this,” Trump crowed about the SAVE Act, which arrived on the Senate floor yesterday, “they probably won’t win another election for 50 years. Maybe longer.”

Trump says that passing the SAVE Act is his “No. 1 priority.” Elon Musk and his fanboys have launched a massive social media campaign to pressure skeptical Republicans. And this week, SAVE Act supporters will keep the debate on the bill going in the Senate for as long as possible, hoping to convince fellow Republicans to break the filibuster and pass it.

My hot take is that trying to steal elections is bad. Which means the SAVE Act is bad.

But as Trump keeps demonstrating, “bad” and “dumb” are not mutually exclusive. Tariffs; Iran; DOGE; gerrymandering; etc. MAGA elites are smarter that many Democrats give them credit for. But they’re way less smart than they think they are.

Which means it’s worth a deep dive into a thorny question: Could the SAVE Act, designed to hand power to Republicans forever, help Democrats instead?

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Before that, a quick programming note: I’m doing a Substack Live with former Biden official and Middle East expert Ilan Goldenberg at 330pm tomorrow (Thursday, 3/19) to talk about the Iran War. I always learn a ton when I talk with Ilan, I promise you will, too!

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I. PROOF OF CITIZENSHIP

The centerpiece of the SAVE Act is a requirement that everyone registering to vote (or re-registering when you move), has to show proof of citizenship.

The percentage of votes cast each year by non-citizens is somewhere around .0001%. So the SAVE Act isn’t trying to go after illegal voting, but there’s almost nothing to go after. It’s trying to suppress the vote. If you’re a citizen – but you don’t have a passport and don’t know where you birth certificate is – this bill would make it almost impossible to register, even though you’re a 100 percent legal voter.

Back in 2020, when I published a book about voting rights and elections called Democracy in One Book or Less, I would have told have agreed with Trump and Musk that this voter suppression plan (masquerading as a proof-of-citizenship requirement) would hurt Democrats. I thought the Obama-Era coalitions would last for decades.

• Democrats run up the score with white-collar professionals, young people, and non-white voters.

• Republicans run up the score with rich voters, old voters, and white voters.

• Everyone fights for the suburbs.

The 2024 election changed that. Trump and Harris split the Hispanic vote almost evenly. Young votes swung toward Trump by 13 points. The 2024 exit polls actually showed Harris winning among voters who make more than $100,000 per year. In other words, race and income aren’t the dividing lines they once were.

So what’s the new biggest fault line?

Education.

I want to be very clear about something: the overwhelming majority of American voters haven’t graduated from college. Democrats need those voters. But in 2024 - not a great year for Dems! - Harris won voters with a college degree by 12 points. Trump won voters without a college degree by 10 points.

Which brings us back to proof of citizenship. Because birth certificates vary by state, the easiest way to prove you’re a citizen is to have a passport. And who are these passport-possessing Americans?

Source: yougov.com

In other words, the more likely you are to have a passport, the more likely you are to vote for Democrats.

Passport ownership is also correlated with living in a city, and being young. So I actually bet even within demographic groups, passport-havers are more likely to vote blue. For example, I’d be willing to bet voters who never attended college and have passports are more Dem-leaning than voters who never attended college and don’t.

To be clear: millions of voters, from both parties, would be disenfranchised by the proof-of-citizenship requirement. But when it comes to passports Republicans would likely lose more votes than Democrats.

1b. BIRTH CERTIFICATES

That leaves us with birth certificates. Republicans and Democrats are equally like to have them, but not all birth certificates would actually count under this bill. And there’s one group of people who, by definition, couldn’t register to vote using their birth certificates under the SAVE Act: women who have changed their names.

I’m not surprised that Trump and Musk think that targeting women targets Democrats. But consider which women would be hurt by this requirement:

• Unmarried women would be fine.

• Married women who don’t change their names would be fine.

• Married women who don’t change their names but do have a passport would be fine.

The group of people who would be most disenfranchised the SAVE Act is women who are married, changed their names, and don’t have a passport.

There are plenty of Democrats in that category. But if you were designing a voter suppression bill to disproportionately target Republican-leaning women, you might come up with something pretty close to the SAVE Act’s proof-of-citizenship requirement.

II. MAIL-IN VOTING

The SAVE Act would require voter ID nationwide. Voter ID isn’t necessary to fight fraud, since there’s no widespread fraud occurring. But it’s also just not that big a deal, and most voters support it.

(My view has long been that Democrats should start supporting Voter ID rather than opposing something that strikes most people as common sense.)

Mail-in voting is another story. Trump wants to make you provide a photocopy of your ID in order to vote by mail. This is what political scientists call “a pain in the ass.”

Which is the point. Just as early voting and mail-in voting make casting a ballot easier, adding new hoops to jump through makes casting a ballot harder. Some voters will give up.

So, which party’s voters are more likely to jump through the extra hoops?

Unlike Mitt Romney’s coalition, the 2024 MAGA coalition relies on “disengaged voters,” or what the research firm Catalist calls, “rotating voters.” Among voters who vote in both midterm and general elections, Harris actually did better than Joe Biden in 2020. Trump became president because of people who don’t always vote - or had never voted before.

This chart, from catalist.org, is a little confusing. But the short version is that first-time voters swung toward Trump by six points compared to 2020, and “super-voters” actually swung toward Harris by one point.

Which group do you think is going to jump through a bunch of extra hoops to vote – people who care about voting in every single election, or people who only vote occasionally?

In other words, the MAGA coalition depends on exactly the kinds of voters most likely to be deterred by inconvenience.

Again, there’s no question lots of Democrats will be deterred from voting, too. But Trump and Musk are promising that the impact of these rule changes will be so disproportionately huge that it becomes impossible for Democrats to win elections.

I don’t think that’s likely. If anything, I think Republicans could get hurt slightly more.

III. SUPRESSING VOTES ISN’T POPULAR

The SAVE Act has another big problem: it can’t get past the Senate filibuster, which requires 60 votes to break. Republicans refuse to lower that threshold.

What Musk and his fellow activists want instead is a “talking filibuster.” This would force Democrats to give as many speeches as they possibly can, and submit to an up-or-down vote if and when they yield the floor.

Smart Republicans don’t want to do this.

A talking filibuster could take up weeks or months of Senate floor time, because Senators can hand off the floor to one another. That means no time for nominations and bills. It also means no recess, which means less time for campaigning in an election year.

Second, while holding the floor, Democrats could introduce unlimited amendments, on any topic, and force votes on them. This would make Republicans vote on things they would like to avoid, like the Epstein Files or their huge tax cuts for a rich.

Third, nothing says, “We don’t care about the cost of living,” like bringing the Senate to a halt over an elections bill. And the more the SAVE Act is debated, the less Americans will like it.

The SAVE Act isn’t a normal bill. But it could cost Republicans votes for a normal reason: voters think the people pushing it are out of touch.

IV. ONE REASON I MIGHT BE WRONG ABOUT ALL OF THIS

If I were a Senate Democrat, I would use this fight to demonstrate how the parties are not the same. Democrats are fighting for rural voters, voters without passports, and voters who registered at the last minute just to vote for Trump.

Because we believe that if you’re an American citizen, your right to vote should be protected. Period.

That said, there’s one big part of the SAVE Act that makes me worry I’m wrong – and that it could be as democracy-destroying as Trump and Musk hope.

The bill would require states to turn over voter files to the federal government, which could flag “non-citizen voters” for removal. Citizens would likely get mistakenly flagged by the government. Wrongly flagged voters would then have to prove their citizenship, with an election official deciding whether the proof is sufficient.

The problem with these “voter purges” is that the potential for selective enforcement is really high. For example, what happens if election officials in Iowa or Georgia accept most affidavits of citizenship from rural counties, but deny most of the ones from cities?

That’s probably not legal – and the most dangerous parts of the SAVE Act are the least likely to hold up in court. But given the Robert’s Courts decades-long record of shredding voting rights, I’m not optimistic that they’ll stand with voters when it counts.

So that’s another reason I don’t think Dems should cave on SAVE: even if there’s a 60 percent chance the bill hurts Republicans, and a 20 percent chance it’s a wash, the worst-case scenario is very bad.

Still, this wouldn’t be the first time Trump and Musk try to act like evil geniuses and only get halfway there. Look at tariffs. Look at DOGE. Look at Iran.

The SAVE Act could turn out to be a blunder of similarly epic proportions.