In June, Monmouth found that 82% of the public back photo ID for voters. That supermajority included 62% of Democratic voters. Hard as it is for many Democratic activists to believe, nonwhites backed it a bit more than Whites did.

The Democrats’ marquee voting-rights bill imposes a national ban on photo-ID requirements for federal elections. It’s an overreach that Republicans can cheerfully oppose — all the more so because they can now point to evidence that such requirements do not reduce voter turnout at all.

Democrats once saw political opportunity in the outrage that the Georgia law inspired. But as their argument against the specific provisions of the legislation collapsed, they had to shift to denouncing the Republicans’ motives. They also had to backpedal on voter identification.

They didn’t always do it gracefully, either. Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina, the third-ranking House Democrat, said in July that “no Democrat has ever been against voter ID.” In October 2020, he had called it “voter suppression.” Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia attempted the same maneuver.