Well, see, now this is what I mean.
Legislative Democrats are huffing and puffing about a Republican move to put voter ID requirements in the state constitution. That measure passed the Senate yesterday with all 15 Democrats voting against it while they filled the chamber with non sequiturs.
The non sequiturs were about gun control. You may wonder about the connection. The agreed upon Democratic argument was that the Republicans were rushing to limit voting rights while real dangers related to guns went unanswered. They’re right about the second part. We should do something about guns. Actually, we should do a lot about guns, but we won’t as long as Republicans are in control and they will be for at least the next two years.
Anyway, I don’t object to the gun argument and I suppose it wasn’t a terrible idea to use the opportunity to highlight it. But what I think is a mistake is to vote against the voter ID stuff. By opposing it Democrats once again demonstrate how out of touch they are with large swaths of the public. Voter ID is supported by 73% of voters according to a recent Marquette poll. The Republicans are rushing this constitutional amendment because they need to approve it this month in order to get it on the ballot in April, when it will pass, probably in every county except Dane.
Democrats can’t seem to move on from 2011. That was the year that Gov. Scott Walker, et. al., enacted the law that requires voters to show a photo ID at the polls. That was, in fact, ill motivated. They wanted to suppress voter turnout.
But here’s the thing. It didn’t work. Turnout in most of the elections since has been at near record highs. And it didn’t even suppress Democratic voter turnout as the Dems have won an overwhelming number of statewide races during that time. So, the arguments that I thought were valid a decade and a half ago turned out to be wrong. It’s just not that big a deal to have to show an ID. It’s worked fine all these years and putting in the constitutional will change nothing. This whole voter ID thing is a big nothing burger.
Nonetheless, legislative Democrats and Gov. Evers will rage against it and the party and affiliated interest groups like (God help us) the League of Women Voters and the ACLU will campaign against it, further eroding their already thin credibility with the public by claiming, without evidence, that this is an attack on our sacred right to vote.
My main point here is that this is a lost cause which deserves to be lost. And yet Democrats and liberals will invest tons of political capital in it. They’ll lose in the end, but more importantly it will just reenforce what too much of the voting public already believes. And, ironically, they believe about the Democrats exactly what the Democrats blamed the Republicans for yesterday on the floor of the Senate: they’re fighting the wrong battles.
Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos 
Because for a long time, Republicans have been using voter ID laws as a way to suppress voting, especially when college IDs weren’t being accepted as a valid form of ID, and of course college students heavily lean Left. You think that Republicans are blissfully unaware of that detail? Expired IDs from seniors who no longer drive weren’t being accepted either.
You say that requiring IDs hasn’t hindered voting, but you have to know that this was a solution in search of a problem, because cases of voter fraud have been so utterly far and few between.
Far, far more votes are suppressed from voter ID laws than cases of fraud are avoided, so it’s pretty obvious which is the bigger problem.
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Or maybe Scott Walker did not want to suppress voter turnout. That was the line Stacey Abrams peddled in Georgia, too. But turnout increased there as it did in Wisconsin. Maybe both Republican governors just wanted to restore faith in elections. Is that possible?
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