The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 10 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
After we recorded this episode, Trump gave a speech demanding for a third time that Republicans pass the SAVE Act, reinforcing the dynamic we discuss here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
President Trump has been demanding that congressional Republicans pass the SAVE Act, which is a massive voter suppression measure. In several angry rants, he’s demanded that they do this rather than doing anything else. But a funny thing is happening. Trump’s order to Republicans is actually trampling on the GOP’s midterm message. Republicans badly want to appear really, really focused on costs and the economy, and a new poll shows they’re in a big hole in the midterms—yet Republicans are still totally in thrall to Trump. So now what do they do?
Few people are better at explaining what’s really going on among House Republicans than congressional scholar Norm Ornstein. So we’re asking him to decode the latest madness for us. Norm, good to have you on.
Norm Ornstein: Always good, Greg.
Sargent: So let’s start with Trump. He erupted on Truth Social, demanding that Republicans pull out all the procedural stops to pass the SAVE Act. First, very briefly, Norm, what’s in the SAVE Act?
Ornstein: Let’s say, Greg, to start with, that every Republican out there talking point is, this is about voter ID, which is supported by 90 percent of Americans. That’s not what the SAVE Act is about. The first thing it’s about is proof of citizenship before you can register to vote, much less vote. And you have to go physically now, even if you’re registered, to a voting office to re-register with a passport, a passport card, or a birth certificate. And to get a passport or passport card if you don’t have one, you need not just any birth certificate—an embossed birth certificate—all of which are costly.
That’s bad enough, but then it gets much worse, because the SAVE Act requires every state to hand over all of its sensitive voter information to the Department of Homeland Security. And that includes a lot of stuff people don’t want shared, which then will cooperate with the Social Security Administration and the IRS, which is a danger to Americans. But they also require the states then to use a program in the Department of Homeland Security called, ironically, the SAVE program, which is a faulty and biased voter-purge software. This software, which has a 14 percent error rate, would then take many voters off the voter rolls, unable to vote, requiring an enormously costly appeal, which most people would not take. And you could be sure that far more of the ones who are purged from the voter rolls will be those who don’t like or would not vote for Donald Trump or Republicans.
It is nationalizing the election process in a bad way.
Sargent: I mean, that is a massive, massive voter suppression effort.. It would really knock out millions and millions of voters. Trump really wants this to pass — on Truth Social, he said the following in great anger:
“It must be done immediately. It supersedes everything else. MUST GO TO THE FRONT OF THE LINE. I, as president, will not sign other bills until this is passed, and NOT THE WATERED DOWN VERSION GO FOR THE GOLD...DO NOT FAIL!!!”
He’s really worked up. So, Norm, he says he doesn’t want the watered-down version. I guess he’s referring to the fact that the House already passed a version of the SAVE Act, which had a lot of these pieces, but not the functional end to mail-in balloting. He wants more. You don’t have 60 votes for this SAVE Act, right? Like, is that the fundamental problem?
Ornstein: The fundamental problem that Republicans have is that the filibuster, which requires 60 votes to pass, is one that they have used over and over when Barack Obama was president, when Joe Biden was president. Democrats, even when they had 59 votes, couldn’t get anywhere if all the Republicans opposed it. That’s where they are now. They have 53 Republicans and they don’t have seven Democrats to pass the SAVE Act. So if they’re going to do this, they are going to have to violate their own promises and change the rules so that you can get to a point where a majority can pass the bill.
Sargent: Right. And in another eruption on Truth Social, Trump said the Senate should focus “exclusively, if necessary,” on the SAVE Act. Now it seems to me there’s no way this thing passes the Senate. And given that, all he’s accomplishing here is telling the base that congressional Republicans are failing his greatness, which could hurt turnout in the midterms and hurt Republicans, right?
Ornstein: This is bizarre in some ways—by promising that he won’t sign anything else, he is not only taking off the table getting funding for TSA, FEMA, and the other parts of the Department of Homeland Security, but he’s also blowing up whatever is left of the agenda of House Republicans, who are teetering at the edge of losing their majority and want to have something to show for it.
At the same time, I would disagree with you in this sense, Greg, and I hope you’re right and I’m wrong. We’ve looked at approval ratings for this president, including for the core issues on immigration, on the economy and the like, and he’s in the toilet and Republicans are in the toilet. They are increasingly concerned in the Senate that not only do they have to worry about seats that would otherwise be in play, like Susan Collins in Maine, but they’re now in trouble in Ohio, potentially in Texas, maybe even in a few other states like Montana, where they otherwise would have felt secure, or Nebraska.
If Senate Republicans believe that they could lose their majority in the Senate, they will in a nanosecond change their rules to jam through the SAVE Act so that their voter suppression can guarantee them a victory even when the vast majority of voters are opposed to them. So I’m a little more worried about their being able to do this — not because Donald Trump is bloviating about it, but because they’ll do anything to save their own skins, even if it destroys democracy.
Sargent: Is there any indication, though, that passing the SAVE Act would necessarily help Republicans? In the midterms, you’re looking at a highly engaged electorate and a lot of those voters are Democratic. And if anything, what Republicans really need most to get through these midterms is some of those low-engagement Trump voters to show up. I’ve got to think that in the crowning irony of all crowning ironies, passing this thing would actually disenfranchise enormous numbers of these low-propensity Trump voters. Am I wrong about that?
Ornstein: It is certainly entirely possible, if you think about who the voters are who don’t have a passport, who don’t have a birth certificate handy, who otherwise would have trouble coming up with what is a poll tax—$130 to $165 to get a passport, $65 for a passport card, but to get that you need a birth certificate. Somebody texted me today that they just got a birth certificate—it cost them $80 to get the embossed one.
Women who have changed their names when they got married, and there are probably more traditional Republicans in that group than Democrats, have to jump through additional hoops. It’s entirely possible, since the electorate has changed and there are more working-class, lower-income voters who are Republicans now than in the past, that it could backfire.
And if it were just a voter ID, or even the hurdle of a passport—which is unconstitutional, it requires a poll tax—but if it were all of that and that were all, I would say you don’t know who will be disenfranchised, even though it’s a horrible thing to do in a democracy, to take away legitimate votes. It’s the other part of it that we talked about before: giving all of this sensitive voter information to the Department of Homeland Security.
And frankly, even if the dumbest member of the Senate, Markwayne Mullin, gets confirmed, it’s not going to be a whole lot different than it was under Kristi Noem. You do not want to trust people who want a police state to have this sensitive information and to use it as a cudgel. And then of course, there are many other measures that Trump will use to try and go after voters and keep the elections from being legitimate. But that’s a whole other story.
Sargent: Well, there’s this interesting tension and conflict among Republicans right now, and it centers on vote by mail. You’ve got a lot of Republicans who actually understand that vote by mail is kind of their friend in some states. And Donald Trump still doesn’t understand that, because in his own head, the only thing he’s able to think about with vote by mail is that it somehow was connected to his 2020 loss. He’s not able to think his way out of that thought bubble. And so you’ve got all these Republicans who don’t, I think, want to do some of this stuff in the SAVE Act—secretly. They can’t say that out loud, but Donald Trump is kind of trying to force them to do it. It couldn’t be happening to a bunch of nicer assholes, really.
Ornstein: That’s certainly true. What I would also say about mail-in voting, though, Greg, is they want to take away the ability for Americans living abroad to vote. They would leave some segment of military voters, but there are millions of Americans abroad who would lose their franchise.
And at the same time, look at what the Postal Service has just done recently—quietly, it’s gotten almost no attention. When you put a piece of mail in the mailbox, as soon as it gets to the post office, it’s been postmarked. So I put a piece of mail in today, on March 9, it gets picked up, it would be postmarked either the 9th or at the latest the 10th. They’ve now said that they will not give a postmark to a piece of mail — not when it’s picked up, not when it goes to the post office—but until it gets to the sorting center. And what’s going to happen is, if we still have voting by mail, where in most states, if you’re postmarked, your vote-by-mail ballot before Election Day—even if it arrives after, because the mail sometimes is slow — it can be counted.
They are going to hold a lot of pieces of mail, probably mostly coming from Democratic precincts and areas, until after the election and postmark them then. So they’ve got other ways that they’re misusing government agencies—with, in this case, a board of governors tilted toward Trump and a head of it who is a Trumpy guy—trying to take away the franchise as well. It’s really pretty awful.
And I want to circle back and say that this notion of taking sensitive voter information is not an entirely partisan issue. In Idaho, which is as red a state as you will find, the state has said, no, we are not voluntarily going to turn over our voting data to you—you can misuse it, and besides, the Constitution gives the authority over elections to the states. Who are you to take away that authority from us? So there’ll be pushback on this, but if they pass the SAVE Act, it’s not voluntary anymore. It would be mandatory.
Sargent: Democrats really have to have an enormous team of lawyers in place to handle all this stuff. And I think that they will. I sure hope so.
A new NBC News poll finds Democrats leading Republicans in the generic House ballot matchup by six points among registered voters, 50 percent to 44 percent. And that matches what the averages of many other polls show. Nate Silver’s average has Democrats leading by 5.4 points—that’s nearly six points. That seems like more than enough to take the House, Norm. Do you expect that to hold?
Ornstein: I do, and I expect it maybe even to widen. You know, as more people, first of all, suffer the consequences of this misguided war as it goes on—gasoline prices up, an economy that’s likely to take a significant blow from it, inflation that’s up—all of that is going to have an impact. What we’ve seen with special elections, and admittedly those are lower-turnout elections, but circling back to what you were saying before: if you curtail the votes of lots of Americans, we will end up with fewer voters. And the motivated ones now are more Democrats than Republicans. We’re likely to see another blow for Republicans in Congress.
But it gets back to a fundamental point here, Greg, which is Trump’s standing and the Republican standing has declined dramatically. Now, if you were a normal president with a normal party, you would look at that and say, maybe we should revise our policies to take into account what is really hurting voters.
Instead, they double down on those because they believe that even if voters have turned against them, they can use this voter suppression. And God knows we may well see Trump declare martial law, say that we’re under attack. We may very well get an Iranian sleeper cell doing a terrorist attack at home and he will suspend the elections. I don’t put anything past these autocratic thugs.
Sargent: I think they might try something like that. I don’t think they’ll succeed, though, Norm—do you?
Ornstein: I hope you’re right. Let’s put it that way. I just don’t know. And part of the reason I don’t know, Greg, is I don’t know how far this Supreme Court will go to slap down a president like Donald Trump if he goes to extremes. And we know he’s fully capable of going to extremes. And we know that Republicans in Congress, with their own necks on the line, are not likely to rebel against him.
Sargent: Well, Republicans, as I’ve said before on here, are acting like they think they’re facing an election. They don’t act that way outwardly, but you can see the signs, the leaks and so forth. So they seem to think they’re facing one.
The NBC poll also finds that Trump’s approval on inflation and cost of living is down at 36 percent, with 62 percent disapproving. That’s abysmal. Fifty-five percent say his tariffs have hurt the economy. Circling back to what you said earlier, there’s a very reasonable chance this goes significantly further south for them, because the war is going to really hit the economy hard. So he, I think, is going to deteriorate more. I think it’s possible he gets into the 20s on the economy, potentially.
And now you’ve got Republicans who are desperately trying to figure out a way to convey to voters that they’re focused on costs. You’ve got Trump blowing that up for them. If you’re a Republican—no wonder you’re retiring, right? Like, what do you think they’re thinking right now? What do you think the candid view is inside the Republican conferences right now?
Ornstein: I think they are dismayed and scared to death. And privately, I know many of them ridicule Trump and the people around him. They were thrilled, most of them, when Kristi Noem was canned. They would love to see clowns like Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnick and Kevin Hassett go by the boards. But this is a cult, Greg, and they’re still sticking with the cult—until maybe there will come a point when they don’t.
But let’s face it: for all of those abysmal numbers, that core base still is with their cult leader, Donald Trump. And until that really begins to crack, I don’t see the vast majority of House or Senate Republicans—who are privately appalled—speaking up and doing anything about it. What we’re going to see, no doubt, is more retirements, more people who can’t look themselves in the mirror in the morning, or just are too conflicted with what’s going on and just want to get out of there.
Sargent: For sure. Norm, you’ve been around a long time. I want to just ask you this question pretty straightforwardly. If we have elections that are free and fair, it’s sure looking like Republicans are going to lose pretty badly. You’re talking about some nightmare scenarios.
There’s reason to think that maybe they won’t get away with some of that stuff. There are maybe other reasons to think they might. What does your gut tell you? What’s your deepest feeling here? Do you think we’re going to have an election, and will Democrats win it?
Ornstein: I think the odds are better than even that we will have an election. I think they will make it as uphill as they possibly can. But I think if there is any semblance of fairness, Democrats win the House and very, very possibly win the Senate. And let me just say, Greg: if that doesn’t happen, we’re toast as a country.
Sargent: Norm Ornstein, that seems like a good place to end. Always good to talk to you.
Ornstein: Yeah. Sorry, I have to be Debbie Downer.