Former Republican strategist Rick Wilson gave President Donald Trump and his supporters a blunt reality check on MS NOW Thursday: Waging a fight about voter ID is not going to save you in the midterms.
The president has made passing an extremely restrictive election bill, the SAVE America Act, a top priority, partly because he believes — based on dubious logic — that it would boost his party in relative turnout, and partly because polls show it’s an issue the public broadly agrees with the GOP on. But that isn’t a magic bullet to solving the Republican Party’s growing problem with voters ahead of the midterm elections, said Wilson — and Democrats shouldn’t be so quick to compromise on it.
“In talking about voter ID, the majority of Americans think voter ID is fine, and that includes Democrats,” said anchor Katy Tur. “Is it a bad idea — and I know there’s no fraud. There’s no — it’s a, it is a solution in search of a problem. Yes. All of that is true. Is it a bad idea for Democrats to say, okay, you want voter ID, fine, have voter ID?”
Wilson shut this idea down.
“Most states already require some form of voter ID, and Democrats, if they accept the predicate of voter ID, then it becomes the passport and then it becomes the birth certificate,” said Wilson. “Then it becomes women who change their name have to go seven extra steps, then it becomes an additional set of costs, a poll tax almost in some of these cases.”
“But here’s the thing, Katy,” Wilson continued. “If you look at the spectrum of most important problems in this country, and you had a list of 100 most important problems, voter id would be number 799. It is not a thing that is going to give the Republicans a political advantage in the coming election. It’s not going to fix their problem about Trump’s ratings on the economy. Trump is a weak president who has done a bad job. They can’t fix that by demanding voter ID.”
“I think Democrats accepting that predicate without — without a secondary discussion about how deeply expensive and harmful it is to a lot of people who don’t have all that ID, you know, all the passport, for instance, I think that is just a political trap that they would fall in,” said Wilson. “I’d recommend they they go back to pointing out Trump’s failures on the economy, where he is truly and desperately weak.”
“Yeah,” said Tur. “And again, voter fraud doesn’t exist. It’s not me saying it. It’s the [pro-Trump] Heritage Foundation saying that — it’s not me, it’s the Heritage Foundation.”
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