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The SAVE Act, gerrymander misfires, and what comes next
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What is the truth behind the SAVE Act? Is it likely to pass in the House and the Senate?
(Chris) This probably deserves its own explainer, given the surprising amount of news coverage it has received. However, here is a quick, truncated version:
The bill in question is the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, otherwise known as the SAVE Act. It would increase the documentation requirements to register to vote, specifically requiring some form of documentation that proves citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport. According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, when a similar law was passed in Kansas, it prevented approximately 12% of people who attempted to registrar from voting.
Republicans want to pass this law because many of them believe that Democrats only win elections because huge numbers of illegal aliens are voting.
The SAVE Act passed the House of Representatives on February 11, by a vote of 218-213.
In the Senate, the bill is subject to the 60-vote cloture rule commonly known as the filibuster, and lacks the bipartisan support needed to meet that threshold.
Some Republicans, including Donald Trump, are demanding changes to the filibuster rule in order to pass the bill. However, to pull this off they need fifty Republicans senators plus Vice President J. D. Vance to do it, and they are simply not close to making that happen, nor will they ever be anytime this year. So, it’s not going to become law.
On Sunday, Donald Trump vowed not to sign any bills until the SAVE Act passes. However, that wouldn’t actually stop anything from becoming law for more than 10 days that are not Sundays. Also, he has already backtracked on this partially, with the White House saying that he would sign a bill to reopen the Department of Homeland Security. We should all expect other exceptions to crop up, such as funding for the war in Iran.
Hope that explains it!
In order to gerrymander for maximum seats, one has to re-draw maps so that there are “enough” of your own party in the re-drawn districts to win. You end up solidifying the districts you are sacrificing, but also potentially “watering down” both the districts in which you expect support and the new districts created, right? What is the chance that the TX re-districting backfires, and if so, to what degree?
(Matt) What you are referring to is sometimes called a “dummymander”—where the party changing the map to their advantage miscalculates and ends up weakening their overall position. This can happen, as you suggest, when voters removed from safe districts neighboring the districts being created end up making those once solidly partisan districts competitive. It can also happen over time through natural population shifts. Before this round of gerrymander wars, districts were assumed to be drawn for a decade—until the next national census—and over that time the composition of districts (and their partisan balance) can change dramatically.
Where the Texas gerrymander risks backfiring on Republicans is in the assumptions they made about the voting behavior of groups in the new districts—especially Latino voters. Recall that Trump benefited from a surge in Latino support in 2024, and Texas Republicans assumed those elevated figures would hold. But they have not. Trump’s job approval has cratered with Latino voters, and Democratic primary turnout exceeded Republican turnout in two newly drawn south Texas districts with large Latino populations. That’s a huge warning sign to Republicans that they would have been better off leaving the map alone.
Hi, I’m wondering (worried) what happens when 47 is finally gone. Americans’ memories are notoriously short, and we are not a patient people. Whoever becomes POTUS 48 will have a big clean-up job to do, which will likely be difficult and painful, with the benefits not showing up until later (if we let that party stay in power long enough to keep working on making positive changes, which unfortunately did not happen in 2024). The portion of the population who still support 47 is not insubstantial, and I’m concerned that they will continue to poison the well, particularly the Republicans in Congress and on the Supreme Court who rolled over for 47. Do you have any thoughts on this? Perhaps I am worrying too much.
(Chris) You probably will not find my answer very comforting, but it is based on my lengthy personal experience in politics.
After Democrats retake power in 2028 or sometime later, there will be a few months of great excitement and some cool things will get passed. However, the country will remain pretty closely divided, and the overwhelming majority of the public will still believe the nation is on the wrong track, as it has without break for 21 years now no matter who is in charge and what economic conditions are. Before you know it, public opinion will begin to turn against the new administration. News audiences for center-left publications will decline substantially. The energy will go out of progressive grassroots activism, and layoffs will begin at progressive advocacy organizations. Infighting will take hold among the Democratic coalition. The outlook for the midterms will not be promising.
This is what happened in 2009-2010, and what happened in 2021-2022. I suspect it will happen again in the future, as I don’t believe that any of the underlying conditions that cause it to happen (some of which are over 140 years old) show any signs of abating.
(Matt) I’m going to offer a slightly different (and more optimistic) view than Chris, based on the cyclical nature of political history. I agree with Chris that a decline in activist energy will come to pass eventually, and if 2029 follows the same pattern as 2009 and 2021, then it will happen sooner rather than later. But there are reasons why 2029 might instead resemble other realigning periods in our history like 1933 and 1981—moments when the country finally turned on a spent regime and permanent new voting alliances emerged.
If it does, a new administration will come to power with a mandate to move the country in an entirely different direction, and with the votes to advance an expansive and responsive public policy agenda. The window for action will be brief—perhaps no more than six months to a year—so a lot will have to happen quickly. But a departure from the politics of the Reagan era—provided the new administration achieves meaningful policy results—could get people to believe the country is moving on the right track and build enough support for the administration to endure the inevitable blowback it engenders (although, as Chris notes, not enough to prevent it from facing erosion in the 2030 midterms).
If you are interested in a more detailed explanation for why I think this could happen, and what would need to transpire for Democrats to create an enduring majority regime, I invite you to read my Project Democracy series.
Is it possible to make our current two party system work with less defined “parties” so individual representatives could more easily vote their conscience on specific issues? What are the current incentives/disincentives for party line votes and can they be changed?
(Matt) It may be strange to imagine, but our era of hyper-partisanship has not always been the rule. Our major parties are composed of broad coalitions of groups that do not always prioritize or want the same things, and for the better part of the middle and late 20th Century it was commonplace for majority coalitions to operate across party lines. Liberal Democrats and liberal Republicans (yes—they existed!) combined to advance civil rights legislation. Conservative Democrats joined Republicans to give Ronald Reagan working majorities for his economic agenda.
Things are so polarized today that the incentives to vote the party line are intense. Republicans are fearful of betraying their leader. Threats posed by the administration pressure Democrats to hold together.
Those incentives could well change once our politics enters a new era. It would also help to have reforms that put an end to partisan gerrymandering. Drawing district lines to favor one party encourages the selection of extreme candidates. Because winning a primary in these districts is tantamount to being elected, there is no incentive for nominees of the favored party to temper their positions to appeal to moderate voters. If you change the manner of selection you will change the character of Congress, making compromise more likely.
Is it worth sending money for the election of Emily Gregory to the Florida state house?
(Chris) I certainly think that it is, yes.
For those of you who don’t know, Emily Gregory (you can view her campaign website here) is the Democratic nominee in the March 24 special election for House District 87 in Florida. That may seem obscure, but the thing which makes this election notable is that it includes Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
Here is my thinking. Trump lives in an information bubble where everything he does is popular, even when it’s not. By winning a special election in the district where he lives, we have a rare opportunity to pierce that bubble and send him a message about his unpopularity that we really have no other way of sending.
The district is winnable. Trump won it by 11 points—that is, 55%-44%—back in November 2024. However, across the nearly 100 special elections for state legislature and US House seats held in 2025-26, there has been an average pro-Democratic swing of 13 points. Further, that swing has been more pronounced in red states like Florida than in purple or blue areas.
I have created an ActBlue page where you can split a donation between Emily Gregory and Bowers Kerbel Media, which is the organization that operates Wolves and Sheep and Bowers News Media. The amount you give to each entity can be altered by clicking “customize amounts.” No donation to Bowers Kerbel Media is required in order to donate to Emily Gregory.