The Myth Both Parties Have Fallen For

And how it wastes Congress’ precious time.

Happy Monday! We got some big news from the Supreme Court this morning, which ruled that President Trump can fire independent agency heads but not Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, and also delivered wins for privacy and for states that count mail-in ballots received after Election Day.

These opinions were just handed down, so I want to take some time to actually read them before writing on them, but expect more to come soon. In the meantime, let’s talk about partisan mythmaking and a lingering belief that our current president and his predecessor both shared…

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

Which modern political figure said this while promoting a piece of election legislation: “They know the only way they can win is to cheat.”

The answer is Jaime Harrison, then the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, who said it about the Republican Party in 2021 after the Democratic elections bill known as the For the People Act was blocked.

If you guessed Donald Trump, well, in a sense you’d be right as well. “The only way they can win is to cheat,” the president said in March about the Democratic Party while calling on lawmakers to pass the Republican elections bill known as the SAVE America Act.

Both of the last two presidents have now made elections bills central to their legislative agenda, expending a significant amount of time, energy, and political capital in hopes of advancing these competing measures.

The For the People Act — which would have expanded early voting and vote-by-mail, mandated automatic and same-day voter registration, made Election Day a national holiday, set up independent redistricting commissions, and reformed campaign finance rules — was designated as H.R. 1 and S. 1 during the Biden administration, a mark of its primary importance to the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. It was quite literally No. 1 on their agenda, and Democrats spent an entire year repeatedly trying to advance the measure, as well as a slimmed-down version called the Freedom to Vote Act.

Similarly, there is no question that the SAVE America Act — which would require Americans to provide documentary proof of citizenship before registering to vote, and to provide photo ID before casting a ballot — is currently President Trump’s top political priority. He has posted about the bill on Truth Social almost 200 times since taking office and has threatened twice now to throttle other GOP agenda items in order to focus attention on the elections measure.

Back in March, Trump announced that he would not sign any bills into law until the SAVE America Act was passed, saying: “It must be done immediately. It supersedes everything else. MUST GO TO THE FRONT OF THE LINE.” (He quickly dropped the threat.) Then, last week, he abruptly called off a signing ceremony for a major bipartisan housing package, saying it was “hereby cancelled until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT, which I consider to be a National Emergency.” In addition, some of Trump’s allies are saying they will completely paralyze the House floor until the SAVE America Act advances in the Senate, though this move is without his blessing.

For both Presidents Biden and Trump, these measures were so important to them that — out of all the major bills each year that run into the roadblock that is the Senate filibuster — these were the ones that led each of them to call on the Senate to lift its 60-vote requirement. Biden was unsuccessful in urging the Democratic-led Senate to change the filibuster rule in favor of the For the People Act, as Trump has been in his push for the GOP-led Senate to do the same for the SAVE America Act, but it is revealing that these were the bills that each man most wanted to catapult over the filibuster threshold.

In both cases, the Biden-era Democratic Party and the Trump-era Republican Party were explicit about their emphasis on these bills stemming from the same assumption: in the ongoing battle for the hearts and minds of the American people, not only do both parties think their ideas are right — they’re also sure that their ideas are winning. Both parties seem to believe they command a clear and overwhelming majority of the American public.

Sure, they know, in an era where power in Washington rapidly seesaws from one party to the other, that they win about as many elections as they lose. But to this each side has a simple answer: Yes, their own party might not win every time — but if only the playing field was level, they obviously would. The other party wins only when they’ve cheated, and somehow rigged the game. That’s why, as the Republican president and Democratic party chair made clear, it was so important for their party to pass a bill setting new election rules as one of their top priorities after entering the White House.

Of course, in both cases, it’s been a bit odd to hear Democrats in 2021 or Republicans in 2025 insist that legislation was urgently needed to un-rig elections … right after winning them. (As GOP Rep. Thomas Massie put it last week: “I think it’s ironic that we control the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the White House — and we’re yelling ‘election fraud’? I mean, we won all the damn elections.”) But, each time, the ruling party has insisted that their grasp on power was tenuous, vulnerable to being unfairly snatched from them at any time.

“We feel if they can do these voting rights laws and other voting rights laws, we will never have a majority — that’s the bottom line,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said in 2022 about the Republican state-level voting laws that the For the People Act was intended to combat. “Republicans will lose power—likely for a long time—if we don’t get SAVE America passed,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) wrote earlier this year.

The bills were presented, under both administrations, as the only way to avoid permanent minority status, and to secure the permanent majority that their party obviously deserves, if only the elections were conducted fairly. Democrats are “doing everything possible [to fight the SAVE America Act] because they know if we get this, they probably won’t win an election for 50 years, OK, and maybe longer,” Trump said in March. “Republicans know that when more people vote, Democrats win,” the Democratic Party wrote on X in 2021, explaining why legislation to expand voting access was necessary.

There is much that is ironic about these mirror narratives that the two parties cling to, but nothing more so than this: Both parties are so convinced that their future victories are contingent on elections bills that, if passed, likely wouldn’t help them win elections.

Numerous political science studies in recent years have come to the same conclusion: laws expanding or restricting voting access hardly ever have an actual impact on the partisan outcome of an election, contrary to each party’s firm belief.

This is true of expanding vote-by-mail, as the For the People Act would have done; four Stanford professors found in a comprehensive 2020 study that universal vote-by-mail “does not affect either party’s share of turnout or either party’s vote share.” (That means the same is also true of limiting vote-by-mail, as Trump wants the SAVE America Act to be amended to also do.) It’s also true of automatic voter registration, another For the People Act provision, which data from Pennsylvania, Oregon, and elsewhere shows does not benefit either party. And it’s true of making Election Day a holiday, which one Princeton study found would have little impact on turnout whatsoever, much less on a partisan basis.

To look at the SAVE America Act, meanwhile, studies have found that voter ID laws do not meaningfully benefit either Republicans or Democrats. A proof-of-citizenship requirement likely would not either; according to an analysis by the Bipartisan Policy Center, equal percentages of Democrats and Republicans have documentary proof of citizenship on hand. States that currently require proof of citizenship for voter registration include Arizona, which has a Democratic governor and two Democratic senators, and New Hampshire, which has a Republican governor and two Democratic senators.

If anything, the Bipartisan Policy Center analysis suggests that Trump’s SAVE America Act could slightly favor Democrats, because — even though members of the two parties have equal access to either a birth certificate or a passport — it is more common for Democrats that their accessible proof is a passport, which are more likely to have a voter’s current name than their birth certificate. (Studies have also long shown that voter ID laws in Republican-led states can similarly backfire, because they motivate Democratic voters to go to the polls. The benefit is minimal, which means neither party really gains much in the end, but the evidence is clear that Republicans certainly do not stand to gain.)

Both parties have fallen for the same myth that there is some special tweak they can make to election laws that will guarantee them power, but studies routinely show that each party’s favored changes would have little impact on their likelihood to win elections. Election laws tend to “target a small group of voters and barely influence turnout,” one 2023 study found. “When turnout does change, it tends not to change disproportionately more for one party or the other.” In general, another pair of scholars wrote in 2021, “turnout, in the range seen in the United States for the past 70 years, has little to no systematic partisan effect.”

When parties shrink or grow the pool of voters, thinking this will ward off alleged chicanery from the other side and secure their side victories going forward, they are usually not doing much. As MIT’s Adam Berinsky has written, while these laws are focused on lowering or erecting barriers to registering to vote or voting, “the direct costs of registration and getting to the ballot box are only part of the picture.”

“The more significant costs are the cognitive costs of becoming engaged with and informed about the political world,” Berinsky found. If someone has already crossed that threshold of mentally deciding to engage with politics, they are likely to end up registering and voting no matter what obstacles are or are not put in their way. Elections laws don’t change much, then, because their impact is mostly only felt by the pool of people who have already decided to vote and likely will vote no matter the legal requirements; to the extent this universe can be grown or shrunk by law, the Democratic and Republican segment of the pool tends to grow or shrink in tandem, wiping away any partisan advantage to either side.

It can be tempting to laugh at how much time each party is wasting on laws that will not do much, but this dynamic is more tragedy than farce.

For one thing, the constant insistence by each party that they command a silent majority of the country, and therefore can only be defeated when their opponents cheat, has trickled down to the electorate in plainly dangerous ways. 67% of Republicans believe Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 election, while 51% of Democrats believe Trump did not legitimately win in 2024, according to a December 2025 poll by YouGov. On the Republican side, this led to the deadly Capitol riot in 2021.

Looking ahead to this November’s races, pluralities of both parties already preemptively smell fraud, according to a recent poll by Politico. 43% of Trump 2024 voters believe Democrats will try to steal the 2026 midterms; 58% of Harris 2024 voters believe Republicans will try to do the same. Of course, their fears are not identical: Politico asked both groups whether they are more worried about ineligible people voting (the type of “voter fraud” that the SAVE America Act was written to combat) or eligible people being kept from voting (the type of “voter suppression” that the For the People Act was intended to respond to).

Surprise, surprise: 52% of Trump 2024 voters said they were more worried about voter fraud, while only 22% said they were more worried about voter suppression. 58% of Harris 2024 voters said they were more worried about voter suppression, while only 16% said they were more worried about voter fraud.

Of course, neither is truly as pernicious a threat as the parties allege: there is no evidence that non-citizens vote in American elections in any sort of widespread way, and no evidence that so-called “voter suppression” laws have any success in suppressing votes (including when looking at specific political, racial, age, or gender groups). The fact that political leaders have convinced their voters otherwise is obviously an unstable place for a democracy to reside.

But there is also a more mundane tragedy hidden here.

It is hard to win the presidency, and there is only so much a party can do once they have won it. The fact that each party, upon winning control in Washington, has plowed so much time and capital into bills they falsely believe would help keep that control in place means that other bills — ones that could actually have a real-world policy impact — are inevitably crowded out.

Most immediately, right now, we can see that with the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, the most significant housing bill at the federal level in more than 30 years, which passed the Senate in an 85-5 vote and the House, 358-32, but has not yet become law because Trump refuses to sign it without the (unrelated) SAVE America Act.

Per the Constitution, if Trump does not sign or veto the bill within 10 days, it will become law with or without him — though he has not yet ruled out vetoing the measure, which would render its future unclear.

There are also other bipartisan bills advancing through Congress that Trump’s single-minded focus on the SAVE America Act could cause issues for. Today, for example, the House is set to vote on the KIDS Act, a package of bipartisan child digital safety bills on social media, age verification, AI chatbots, data privacy, and online drug sales.

Meanwhile, Senate committees have recently advanced bipartisan bills on everything from college sports to cameras at the Supreme Court. It is unclear whether Trump’s refusal to sign the housing bill extends to other bipartisan measures — I asked the White House, but all they sent me in response was Trump’s Truth Social post canceling the signing ceremony — or when the logjam on the House floor by Trump’s allies will be cleared.

I spent a day last week running around the Capitol asking lawmakers if they were worried about other bipartisan priorities running into Trump’s blockade. “I can’t answer that for you,” Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) told me. “Most bipartisan priorities are awful,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) said. “It’s the president’s prerogative,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) replied. “Have you ever read the Constitution?”

I said I had, and agreed it was the president’s prerogative whether to sign bills into law. “See, you just answered your own question,” Kennedy said. When I followed up, asking whether — granting that the president could refuse to sign bipartisan bills into law — it would concern him as a member of the legislative branch if Trump began doing so, Kennedy ignored the question.

At least one Republican lawmaker, Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) at least acknowledged the possible concern when I asked her if Trump’s stance on the housing bill was a bad sign for the CLARITY Act, a bipartisan crypto bill Lummis has championed.

Lummis said she thought Trump would be willing to sign other bills into law, but said she planned to “stay in touch with the president about that” as the CLARITY Act advanced. “I’m going to make sure that I visit with him, but I think it’s going to be OK. But I’m a glass-half-full person.”

I wanted to ask Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) about the pending defense authorization bill working through his Armed Services Committee, and Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) about his public lands bill that recently passed in the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, but I wasn’t able to flag either of them down.

With all of these irons in the fire, Congress is in the midst of a notably productive period — as long as the president’s focus on election law doesn’t get in the way. Instead of trying to end the Senate filibuster, he could be promoting bills that would likely be able to surmount it, just like the housing bill (which many Republicans also believe would be a political boon in an election year). Congress only has so much time; it is revealing how Trump is calling on lawmakers to spend it.

Then again, can we be surprised by Trump’s focus on the SAVE America Act? After all, as we have been told by two successive administrations now, the president’s party is just One Neat Trick away from a permanent majority. If only politics were as easy as its practitioners imagine.