Here’s a delicious irony: Republicans know the SAVE Act would be a disaster for their party, but they can’t get President Donald Trump to see it.
The polarizing legislation behind the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act would require people to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship—like a passport or birth certificate—when registering to vote in federal elections. Trump and his acolytes claim this would stop noncitizen voting, which is already vanishingly rare. Critics point out the obvious: It would make voting harder for a lot of eligible voters.
Primary voters arrive to cast ballots at an official vote center in Dallas on March 3.
Normally, that’s the point. Voter suppression has long been a feature of GOP strategy, not a bug. But that thinking is outdated, as lower-propensity voters are increasingly Republican.
Which makes this GOP-backed bill not just an affront to democracy, but politically self-destructive.
One key provision would require a birth certificate that matches a voter’s current name. It’s driven in part by the GOP’s fixation on trans people, who make up a tiny sliver of the electorate. But the real impact would fall on married women who changed their last names, and they are disproportionately a Republican-leaning group.
In 2024, 52% of married women voted for Trump, but only 38% of unmarried women backed him, making for a yawning 14-point gap in support. And the women most likely to have changed their names are the same ones more likely to vote Republican.
A 2023 Pew study found that 86% of married conservative women took their husband’s last name, compared to 70% of liberal women. Education reinforces the pattern: The more educated a woman is, the less likely she is to change her name—and the more likely she is to vote Democratic.
Related | GOP's new voter suppression bill won't SAVE anything
Current passports could solve the documentation issue, but about half of Americans don’t have one. And the same patterns hold: Higher income and higher education make passport ownership more likely, and both of those factors correlate with Democratic voters.
So once again, the burden falls hardest on Trump’s base.
The states where Trump performed best in 2024 tend to have the lowest passport ownership rates. A 2023 YouGov survey found that 52% of Trump voters lacked a valid passport, compared to 45% of Biden voters. There’s also a gender gap: 55% of women don’t have passports, versus 49% of men. Among evangelicals—a core GOP constituency—only 38% have passports. Urban and suburban residents are far more likely to have them than rural voters.
Women could ostensibly use a marriage certificate to bridge the name-change gap. But that assumes they have one readily available. Many don’t—especially older women who changed their names decades ago and are less likely to still have those documents on hand.
Related | You may soon need a passport to vote. Trump is making it harder to get one.
And replacing them isn’t simple. It costs money, takes time, and often requires in-person trips to government offices.
Those barriers hit hardest in rural areas, where distances between government offices are fewer and distances between them longer, and transportation can be a real obstacle. The very voters most likely to face these hurdles—older, rural women—are also a core part of Trump’s base.
That’s how voter suppression actually works: not through one big barrier, but through a series of smaller hassles. Each step increases the odds that someone decides it’s not worth it and drops out. Those pressures hit hardest among lower-income, older, and rural voters—the same voters the GOP now relies on.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune speaks to reporters after a weekly Republican luncheon at the Capitol on March 10.
That’s the shift Republicans haven’t fully adjusted to.
For decades, lower-income and less-educated voters leaned Democratic, and Republicans built strategies around keeping them from the polls. Trump flipped that coalition and turned out voters who historically sat out elections.
And now this bill risks pushing those same voters back out.
Many Republicans understand that, even if they won’t say it out loud. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, for example, has shown no interest in blowing up the filibuster to pass the SAVE Act, even as Trump pressures him not to cave and end the ongoing government shutdown unless Democrats agree to support the vote-suppressing legislation.
It’s easier to let Democrats take the blame for killing the bill than to tell Trump he’s wrong.
