Schiff rejects voter ID despite Pew poll showing 71% of Democrats support it

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) was presented with a Pew Research poll showing that 83% of American adults — and 71% of his own party — support requiring photo ID to vote. His answer: no.

ABC's Jonathan Karl put the numbers to Schiff directly during an interview, asking whether photo ID was something he could support. Schiff dismissed it as voter suppression. Karl pressed. Schiff held the line. And in doing so, he positioned himself against a supermajority of the country and a commanding majority of Democratic voters.

This is the state of the Democratic Party on election integrity in 2025: they'd rather invoke Jim Crow than agree with seven out of ten of their own voters.

The exchange that matters

Karl didn't ambush Schiff with a loaded question. He asked a straightforward question — whether Democrats could support photo ID as a standalone measure, separate from the broader SAVE Act that Republicans are pushing. Schiff immediately pivoted away from the question he was asked and toward the one he wanted to answer, reframing Karl's inquiry as a concession to Republican "distrust."

"Jonathan, what you've just asked is essentially: Republicans have created distrust in the elections by making claims of nonexistent fraud in the elections, and shouldn't we use the distrust they've created in order to enact a voter suppression law, which is the SAVE Act, which would require people to have a birth certificate or passport — documents that millions of Americans don't have."

Karl corrected him, Fox News reported. He wasn't asking about the SAVE Act. He was asking about photo ID — a driver's license, a state-issued card — and whether Schiff could meet the vast majority of Americans where they already stand. Karl laid out the numbers from the August 2025 Pew Research poll: 83% of adults, 71% of Democrats, 95% of Republicans.

Schiff's response to the actual question was revealing:

"It's still going to be something that disenfranchises people that don't have the proper Real ID, driver's license ID, that don't have the ID necessary to vote, even though they are citizens. This is another way to simply try to suppress the vote."

No data. No estimate of how many citizens lack any form of photo identification. Just the assertion that requiring ID — the same ID you need to board a plane, buy cold medicine, or pick up a package at the post office — amounts to suppression when applied to voting.

The deflection playbook

Watch the sequence carefully because it's a template the left uses on every election integrity question.

Step one: reframe a popular, common-sense proposal as something more extreme. Karl asked about photo ID. Schiff answered about birth certificates and passports. These are not the same thing, but conflating them lets Schiff fight a scarecrow instead of the actual question.

Step two: assert harm without evidence. Schiff claimed photo ID "disenfranchises" people but offered no numbers on how many citizens lack any form of photo identification. He referenced passports and birth certificates — neither of which Karl asked about — and declared that "millions of Americans" would be affected. By what? A driver's license requirement? He never said.

Step three: connect the specific proposal to a broader conspiracy. Schiff folded photo ID into what he called a "broader disenfranchisement effort," lumping it together with changes to absentee voting and voter registration methods:

"And the last thing I think we want to do is discourage more citizens from voting while they're attacking those same elections, while they're trying to do away with absentee ballot voting, while they're trying to do away with being able to register to vote through the DMV or by the mail. So, it's part of the broader disenfranchisement effort, and no, I don't think that's the right direction."

This is how a senator opposes something that 83% of Americans support without ever having to say why the specific thing is wrong. You don't argue the merits. You change the subject, expand the scope, and make every reform sound like the same threat.

Schumer goes further

If Schiff was evasive, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) was blunt. Appearing on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on Thursday, Schumer called the SAVE Act "Jim Crow 2.0" and declared that it would receive zero Democratic votes in the Senate.

"This is vicious and nasty. And I said to our Republican colleagues, it will not pass the Senate. You will not get a single Democratic vote in the Senate. We're not reviving Jim Crow all over the country."

Schumer offered his own hypothetical to illustrate the supposed danger: a woman who changed her last name after marriage wouldn't be able to show ID and would be "discriminated against." This is a scenario that every state DMV in America handles routinely through name-change documentation — the same process required for updating a bank account, a Social Security card, or a lease. But in Schumer's telling, it becomes evidence of systematic discrimination.

The Jim Crow comparison deserves a moment of clarity. Jim Crow laws were a regime of state-enforced racial segregation that denied Black Americans basic civil rights through violence, economic coercion, and legal apartheid. Comparing that history to a bill that asks voters to show the same identification required to enter a federal building is not a serious argument. It's a rhetorical weapon designed to end the conversation before it starts.

The numbers Democrats can't escape

The Pew poll sits at the center of this story because it demolishes the foundation of the Democratic argument. If voter ID were truly a tool of suppression — if it were genuinely understood by the public as an attack on voting rights — you would not see 71% of Democrats supporting it. You would not see 83% of all adults in favor of it.

Those aren't soft numbers. That's consensus territory. The kind of consensus that politicians usually race to get in front of, not run away from.

Yet here stands the Democratic Party's Senate leadership, unanimous in opposition to something their own base overwhelmingly endorses. Schiff calls it suppression. Schumer calls it Jim Crow. And neither one can explain why the very voters they claim to be protecting disagree with them.

That's not a policy position. It's a tell. When the only argument against election security is that voters can't be trusted to know what's good for them, the argument has nothing to do with voters at all and everything to do with the Democrat agenda. Someone needs to remind people like Schiff that they are in office to represent us, not lead us.