The News
Wisconsin voters will decide Tuesday whether to add their 10-year old voter ID requirement to the state’s constitution. Soon after that, lawmakers will vote on whether to require a government ID that proves the holder’s citizenship before registering to vote.
Both are Republican priorities, opposed by Democrats. But the two major parties’ coalitions are shifting — and the old assumption that Republicans appealed to the affluent voters most likely to have their paperwork in order, while Democrats mobilized less educated, poorer Americans who sometimes lack documents like drivers licenses and passports, is no longer clear.
An academic study last year suggested that ID requirements — especially in the sort of lower-turnout races where Democrats now thrive — don’t threaten the party as they used to, when it has sued on the grounds that the rules discriminated against Black voters. Rick Hasen, an academic critic of GOP actions in the “voting wars,” has suggested that some sort of voter identification rule could be part of a compromise to end them.
“Democrats are appealing more to higher income, higher educated voters who are more likely to have ID,” Hasen told Semafor. “Democrats and their allies have invested significant resources in getting IDs to the people who need them – though that’s money they could be using on other priorities. The people who don’t have ID are the least likely to vote anyway.”
But that hasn’t changed the politicking around ID rules. Democrats warn that they’re suppressive or wasteful. Republicans suggest that the rules are needed to stop inevitable, anti-GOP election rigging by the far left.
“You can sort of tell where voter fraud is happening, where they ban ID, you know?” Elon Musk said at his Sunday night rally for Republicans in Green Bay. “Like, why would you ban ID? Like, New York and California, it’s illegal to show ID at an election!”
Earlier, Democratic Party of Wisconsin chairman Ben Wikler told Semafor that the voter ID “ploy” deserved to fail – though he was confident that Susan Crawford, the judicial nominee backed by Democrats, could win with the current requirement in place.
“It’s an attempt to cement in the Constitution something that they passed into law on false pretenses, and in bad faith, years ago, in order to suppress the votes of people that they didn’t want to cast ballots,” Wikler said.
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David’s view
Republicans put the voter ID measure on Wisconsin’s ballot to drive up turnout from their base, a common tactic for them in off-year elections that most people skip. They were clear about why: It was popular, and Crawford had worked with the League of Women Voters to temporarily block their 2011 ID law. (It only went into effect in 2015.)
“Any supposedly nonpartisan candidate who opposes simple constitutional voter ID requirements disqualifies themselves from elected office,” Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos explained in January.
Yet while in the state last month, I was struck by how little paid messaging I saw on voter ID. Democrats were urging a “no” vote. Republicans were much more loudly urging a “yes” vote. It hadn’t become a decisive issue in the race between Crawford and GOP/Musk-backed Brian Schimel.
Part of that was Democratic triage. Opposing voter ID polls worse than basically any other issue in this race, with a 2021 Marquette Law School poll finding 74% support for the current requirement. Wikler’s party sees a larger Trump-led effort to undermine confidence in elections when Republicans don’t win, and other parts of that agenda – like the nearly-successful effort in 2020 to throw out absentee ballots in liberal strongholds – are less popular and easier to campaign against.
But ID remained at the front of mind for Republicans, who like Musk warned that their party might not win again if election workers didn’t get to see photo ID at the polls. “The only states that Kamala Harris won in the last election were states that did not have voter ID,” former Gov. Scott Walker told voters at a rally last month.
That’s a popular but incorrect factoid. Harris won New Hampshire and Rhode Island, where voters must show ID to cast ballots, and carried other states like Colorado where ID is required to register. Democrats won the 2020 presidential race in Wisconsin, and the 2018 and 2022 races for governor, with ID requirements in place. The ballots Republicans need today are from the less-frequent Trump voters who usually skip elections; they need them to overwhelm high-turnout liberals who don’t misplace their paperwork.
“Democrats are not the only ones who have an outdated view of who their electorate is,” said Hasen.
Where they control state government, Democrats remain opposed to voter ID requirements, citing the potential threat to lower-income and non-white voters. Republicans enjoy baiting them on the question, which is why the SAVE Act will get a vote this week, and why the president signed an executive order last week attempting to add more identity requirements for registration. That’s being challenged by groups that, by and large, support Democrats.
Trump’s endorsement is a good way to get Democrats opposing any election reform idea. But the electoral calculus here is different than it was 10 or 20 years ago. Democrats have done more work than Republicans on getting their less-reliable voters in line with state election law.
What happens if Musk’s candidate loses this race, while the Musk-endorsed voter ID amendment passes? There’d be some clarity about the impact of these rules on the current red and blue coalitions, whether or not they want to see it.
Room for Disagreement
When he was campaigning in Wisconsin last month, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said that it was still essential for Democrats to oppose strict voter ID requirements. They were, he believed, fruit from the poisoned tree.
“It’s voter suppression to us,” he told Semafor while campaigning in the state last month. “It makes it more difficult to vote, which usually tends to fall upon Democratic voters. They want to shrink the electorate rather than expand it.”
Notable
- Lakshya Jain and Giacomo Pensa break down the GOP’s “turnout problem” in Wisconsin’s off-year elections in Split Ticket. “This fits in with a broader trend, where areas that are high-income, high-education, and high-employment all tend to vote more, especially in off-cycle elections,” they write. “While this would have spelled doom for Democrats just a decade ago, it has turned into a net benefit for them in the Trump era.”