Why stricter voting laws no longer help Republicans

Having embraced voting restrictions for so long Mr Trump and his party are reluctant to abandon them, even if they no longer help them win elections

“The Republicans should pray for rain”—the title of a paper published by a trio of political scientists in 2007—has been an axiom of American elections for years. The logic was straightforward: each inch of election-day showers, the study found, dampened turnout by 1%. Lower turnout gave Republicans an edge because the party’s affluent electorate had the resources to vote even when it was inconvenient. Their opponents, less so.

President Donald Trump (REUTERS/Nathan Howard)(REUTERS)

The findings offered an empirical reason for Republicans to make voting harder for marginal or “low propensity” voters. The party and its conservative allies had already adopted voting restrictions as an ideological plank, one previously advanced by southern Democrats courting white support in the Jim Crow era. In 2013 the Supreme Court gutted the preclearance system under the Voting Rights Act that had forced most southern states to vet changes to their voting rules with the federal government. Alabama, Mississippi and Texas immediately enacted voter ID laws that had been previously blocked. Over the next decade 29 states passed nearly 100 bills to restrict voting and Donald Trump’s obsession with “election integrity” became Republican doctrine.

Yet Mr Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party has scrambled the voting coalitions that underpinned the pray-for-rain logic. Rich people used to vote Republican and poor people Democrat. But the correlation started to wane in the 2000s and ultimately flipped for white voters when Mr Trump ran, according to research by Michael Barber and Jeremy Pope at Brigham Young University. Poor blacks and Hispanics still voted Democrat, but in 2024 they too moved to the right. At the same time, voters without college degrees took to the Republican Party and the college-educated moved in the other direction. Today voters who may or may not bother to turnout for elections no longer vote overwhelmingly for Democrats.

Having embraced voting restrictions for so long Mr Trump and his party are reluctant to abandon them, even if they no longer help them win elections. In his second term the president is jostling for even tighter rules. Amongst his barrage of executive orders just one has dealt with elections, but it is one of his most constitutionally ambitious. In it Mr Trump criticises America’s “patchwork of voting methods” and calls for a national set of rules that require voters to prove their citizenship before registering. The attorney-general, it said, would also force states to stop counting absentee ballots that arrive after election day. A judge blocked the order, writing that Congress and the states set election rules under the constitution, not the president. She noted that Congress is considering a similar bill and Mr Trump should not “short-circuit” that. The SAVE Act, which cleared the House in April, also makes voters prove citizenship. But it is very unlikely to pass the Senate.

States, however, are passing voter restrictions with gusto. Since January at least 25 states have introduced new voter ID bills, 30 have ones related to citizenship verification and 26 are trying to change the rules around absentee voting. Florida lawmakers decided to punish non-citizens who vote with up to five years in prison and Wisconsin voters enshrined a voter ID requirement in their state’s constitution. Americans want it to be harder to cheat in elections and “that’s why states aren’t waiting for a solution from Washington,” says Lee Schalk of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative group that writes model legislation. Indeed, Gallup polling shows that more than 80% support stricter ID and citizenship rules.

In every country in Europe, where politics tends to be more liberal, voters must show ID at the polls. Would even stricter rules affect election outcomes in America? Consider Georgia, a swing state controlled by Republicans. When an omnibus election bill that tightened voter ID rules passed in 2021 Stacey Abrams, a Democrat who had run for governor, warned that it would disenfranchise black voters. She called it “Jim Crow in a suit and tie”. But turnout in the next year’s midterms surged and a consensus grew among election wonks that the suppression effect was negligible. Analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice, a public-policy institute, found that the turnout gap between white and black voters did widen in Georgia between 2020 and 2024. But the new rules may not have been to blame. The drop-off was mostly limited to younger black men, who were particularly unenthused by Kamala Harris. Fewer young women of both races voted for the first time, but white women slid more than black women.

Democrats across the country argue that new citizenship verification policies will cause mass confusion and get citizens tangled up in bureaucracy. The hassle would be more justifiable if the new laws solved a big problem, but non-citizens rarely vote. An audit by Georgia’s secretary of state from the summer of 2024 found just 20 non-citizens out of 8.2m on the voter rolls. Most were registered before Georgia checked for citizenship and had never cast a ballot.

The best evidence seems to be that the impact of restrictive laws is minimal. An analysis published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics of 1.6bn voting records from every state in America found that strict voter ID rules, on average, neither significantly suppressed votes nor prevented fraud. Nor do ID laws hurt Democrats any longer, other research by Jeffrey Harden and Alejandra Campos shows. While in 2010 voter ID laws reduced Democratic vote share by 3%, by 2020 they increased it slightly. Because of the changes in party voting coalitions, the overall effect of the next phase of even tighter voting rules could now “easily be a wash” when it comes to benefitting one party or the other, says Nicholas Stephanopoulos, who studies elections at Harvard University.

Will Republicans change tack? After the 2020 election some Republicans blamed Mr Trump’s loss on his tirades against mail-in voting. By 2024 the party and Mr Trump himself had changed their tune on it. In an ad titled “Swamp the Vote” Mr Trump encouraged voters to “use every appropriate tool available to beat the Democrats”, including by voting absentee. Republicans may again decide that winning matters more than being consistent. But their retreat from insisting on stricter rules around voting would be a tacit admission that American elections are already safe and fair.