Republicans Persist In Newest Voter Suppression Fad Despite Evidence That It Hurts Their Constituents Too

Then-candidate Donald Trump and his Republican congressional allies fixated on the great “threat” of noncitizen voting in the 2024 campaigns. Despite copious research showing that this type of voter fraud is extremely rare, it was the election conspiracy theory du jour — out with bamboo fibers, magical voting machines and ballots in dumpsters, in with the “busloads of illegals.” 

Things quieted after Trump won — no immediate need for the scapegoating-immigrants backup plan in case of a loss. But they’ve revved up again lately, as the 2026 midterms, which history and recent polling suggests could be a good cycle for Democrats, inch closer. 

The House passed the SAVE Act, a bundle of voter restrictions predicated on the specter of noncitizen voting, last month. It awaits a vote in the Senate, where it would almost certainly fail to win enough support to overcome a Democratic filibuster. Trump put out a version of the bill in executive order form earlier this year. Some red state officials hopped aboard the Trump campaign’s fearmongering before the 2024 election and enacted proof-of-citizenship requirements — one to self-admittedly disastrous effect — and copycat bills are permeating other red and purple states. 

Those state-level experiments, particularly in Kansas and Arizona, might have served as a warning to national Republicans — that the citizenship requirements didn’t really work, were extremely onerous for election officials to enforce and, perhaps most importantly for a gambit aimed at suppressing perceived unfriendly votes, netted an awful lot of Republicans. 

“Kansas did that 10 years ago,” Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab, a Republican who had spearheaded the proof of citizenship push as a legislator, said. “It didn’t work out so well.”

But, due to some combination of an unshakeable faith in voter restrictions, fear of running afoul of Trump and perhaps a concern that the much ballyhooed demographic shifts in the 2024 election aren’t as permanent as some believe, national Republicans are sticking to the script.

State-Level Bungling 

The Kansas proof of citizenship requirement, enacted in 2013, was ultimately blocked by the courts as an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote and hasn’t been enforced since 2018 — but not before it blocked 31,000 U.S. citizens from the ballot box. 

In Arizona, the partisan buffoonery was on even greater display. The state already had a two-track registration system, where voters without documentary proof of citizenship became “federal only” voters, barred from voting in state and local elections. The Republican trifecta passed additional proof of citizenship requirements in 2022 to block voters from voting in some federal elections as well, presumably leaning on data indicating that the voters least likely to have the required documents were younger, less white and located in lower-income and less-educated neighborhoods — traditional Democrats, in other words. 

Cut to 2024 when Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican, discovered a glitch in the voter database — nearly 200,000 registered voters were not qualified to vote under the new citizenship requirements. This became a problem for the state GOP when it discovered that most of those voters were Republicans. 

“Each of the affected voters currently have the right of suffrage and have regularly exercised that right in state elections, many multiple times for decades,” Arizona Republicans railed in a brief, seeking to not enforce the law they’d championed.

These recent experiences suggest proof-of-citizenship requirements — which are much less intrusive than those in the SAVE Act, which would require trips to election offices with the required documents every time a voter updates or changes their registration, and not just once like the state models — are hamfisted, inefficient and hurt Republican voters too. So why haven’t national Republicans given up the fantasy?

A New Party 

The question becomes more pressing given that some traditionally Democratic groups — young men, Latinos, Black voters — have showed signs of a rightward shift, a trend intoxicating to Republicans who long feared that their aging white base would shrink out of electoral relevance. 

The proof-of-citizenship requirements target those groups, creating a risk that Republicans are taking the air out of a trend sloping in their direction. Nonetheless, this push for such measures as the SAVE Act persists.

“Donald Trump has been obsessed with the idea of noncitizen voting in elections since his 2016 run and maybe even before then — he had the citizenship obsession anyway since he was questioning Barack Obama’s birth certificate,” Jonathan Diaz, director of voting advocacy at the Campaign Legal Center, told TPM. “I don’t think the Republican Party of 15 years ago would have pursued the SAVE Act in its current form because it would have recognized that it prevents a lot of people who would vote Republican regularly from voting. But because Donald Trump is so focused on this issue, his gravitational pull on the party is so immense that everybody is going along with it.”

Diaz added that it’s become a kind of “litmus test” for Republican candidates. 

So far, the effect of such measures would likely still hurt Democrats more, the chaos in Arizona notwithstanding.

“There are reasons why the electorate is volatile and potentially prone to shifts, but keep in perspective that these shifts are relatively minor — women, young people, Latinos, African Americans are still leaning Democratic,” Ron Hayduk, an expert in immigrant voting at San Francisco State University, told TPM.

Those groups might be more Republican-curious than they once were — though Hayduk pointed to some early data showing that many of those voters are already souring on Trump — but the majority of those voters are still safe bets as Democrats, he argues. The demographics haven’t shifted enough to warrant a change in the Republican playbook.

Eliza Sweren-Becker, senior counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, confirmed to TPM that their data shows “at a national level, Democrats are more likely to lack ready access to a passport or birth certificate.” 

Experts point to other dynamics afoot too that might encourage Republican support of these measures, even if they take more a sledgehammer and less a scalpel to the electorate. Above all, there’s also the messaging benefit. Unlike on the state level, for national Republicans, the efforts to impose a citizenship requirement aren’t going anywhere fast. Senate Democrats are adamantly against the bill, which would need their votes to overcome a filibuster; even Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) dismissed his voters’ fears at a town hall by saying that he doesn’t “expect” the bill to come up for a vote since it won’t get 60 votes. 

Trump’s executive order is tied up in court. A federal judge blocked pieces of it last week. 

So while the ramifications are locked behind 60 votes and judges’ gavels, they can crusade on the conspiracy theory.

“It keeps immigrants and immigration in the news,” Hayduk said, adding that changing the subject helps “displace people’s anxieties about the cost of eggs onto immigrants.”