Why are Democrats making it so?
This week, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) branded the Republican-backed “SAVE Act” with a familiar narrative: “Jim Crow 2.0.”
While catchy, Americans should recall the last time Democrats trotted out this exact narrative.
In 2021, Georgia passed SB 202, an omnibus election law that made relatively modest changes: requiring ID for absentee ballots, standardizing early-voting hours, and clarifying rules for drop boxes.
The law did not make Georgia an outlier — on the contrary.
In fact, many of its loudest critics governed states with equal or stricter voting requirements, including limits on absentee voting and ID rules in places like New York, Delaware, and New Jersey. That inconvenient comparison was completely ignored.
Instead, Democrats and major media figures branded the law “Jim Crow 2.0,” a phrase later repeated by Joe Biden as he argued for federal voting legislation. The accusation was morally explosive — but analytically thin.
Then the real-world test arrived. In the 2022 midterms, Georgia recorded its highest early-voting turnout ever for a midterm election, under the very system said to be resurrecting segregation. The predicted mass disenfranchisement — especially of Black voters — never materialized. Yet there was no accountability for the rhetoric or the economic and civic backlash it helped justify.
Now, Democrats are attempting to revive the “Jim Crow 2.0” label for new voter-ID proposals, even though voter ID is one of the most consistently popular election policies in America.
Yet, despite the embarrassing failure of the Jim Crow 2.0 narrative in 2021, Democrats are trying to resurrect it.
“The SAVE Act is nothing more than Jim Crow 2.0.,” raged Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer this week on Capitol Hill. “If the SAVE Act were to become law, online registration, registration by mail, and registration drives would become a thing of the past. If you’re one of tens of millions of Americans who does not have access to your birth certificate, or if you’re one of the 50% of Americans who don’t have a passport, the SAVE Act could make it impossible for you to participate in elections.”
“It would lead to massive purges that inevitably remove legitimate American citizens who have the right to vote from voter rolls,” exaggerated Sen. Schumer wildly. “Even married couples aren’t spared under the SAVE Act. If you get married and change your last name, you too would be at risk of getting booted off the voter rolls. This is just an outrageous piece of legislation. It’s turning the clock back a hundred years. It comes out of some right-wing brain that believes certain people really shouldn’t vote, that some citizens are more valuable than others.”
Yet, despite the hyperbole, the vast majority of Americans support — wholeheartedly — voter ID laws.
“On showing a photo I.D. to vote, the American people are with Nicki Minaj,” CNN chief statistician Harry Enten explained on Wednesday. “Look, I’ve got all this polling on the screen going back since 2018. You’ll notice on all of it, it’s all north of 75 percent, 76 percent, 76 percent, 76 percent, 81 percent, and then 83 percent in the last year of Americans agree with Nicki Minaj, they favor photo I.D. to be able to vote.”
“You’ve got 95 percent of Republicans, pretty much all of them, but even 71 percent of Democrats favor photo I.D. to vote,” revealed Enten. “And what you see is, is that the American people — actually it’s not really all that controversial. The American people are with Nicki Minaj, whether they are Republican or even if they are Democrats. We’re talking about seven in ten Democrats agreeing with Nicki Minaj that you, in fact, should show a voter photo I.D. to vote.”
“OK, what’s the racial breakdown on this, right, because I think a lot of people make the argument that people of color, nonwhite Americans, have a harder time procuring a photo I.D. to vote,” Enten clarified. “But even here, take a look here, favor photo I.D. to vote. Eighty-five percent of white people favor it. Eighty-two percent of Latinos. Seventy-six percent of black Americans favor it.”
“So, the bottom line is this, voter I.D. is not controversial in this country,” concluded Enten.
So why are elected Democrats so opposed to voter ID?
President Donald Trump, naturally, has an opinion on the subject:
“We should have voter ID, by the way. We should have a lot of the things that I think everybody wants to see. Who would not want voter ID? Only somebody that wants to cheat. Think of it. We don’t have voter ID. And the Democrats don’t want it. And the reason they don’t want it, because they want to cheat. Because there’s no reason in the world, and I love that debate.”
“I love saying, well, why don’t you want voter ID? And you watch them say, I don’t know, I just can’t,” Trump continued. “It’s a terrible thing.”
(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)