What do you do if you are the networks and President Donald Trump has pushed a proposal (like the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act on voter ID) that enjoys over 70 percent support?
If you are fair, you’d cover it.
If you are opposed to all things Trump, you could savage it, to try to bring its popularity down.
Or you could pretend it doesn’t even exist.
So, how much time have the networks devoted to this very popular Trump administration proposal?
Zero seconds.
MRC analysts reviewed the ABC, CBS, NBC evening and morning news shows from February 11 (when the SAVE America Act passed the House) to the morning of March 6 and found the broadcast networks have completely BURIED the bill.
This is despite the SAVE America Act enjoying massive popularity in two recent polls.
On March 2, the Harvard Caps Harris Poll reported:
“71% of voters support the SAVE America Act (Democrats: 50%; Republicans: 91%; Independents: 69%), with 54% prioritizing stopping voter fraud over access concerns for eligible citizens.”
The Harris poll also found:
“The majority of voters support specific requirements of the Act, including proof of citizenship (75%), voter ID (81%), states removing non-citizens from voter rolls (80%), and states sharing redacted voting rolls with the Department of Homeland Security (61%).”
On February 23, Heritage Action released a poll that also showed broad support for the SAVE Act in “battleground” states:
“New polling from Heritage Action across five battleground states demonstrates that the SAVE America Act is broadly supported by voters. Across Alaska, Georgia, Maine, North Carolina, and Ohio, more than 70 percent of likely voters oppose non-citizen voting. More than 80 percent agree that every legal voter should have confidence their ballot is counted equally and not diluted, and nearly 80 percent support applying the same eligibility standard in every state for federal elections. The data shows the electorate is not divided on this issue.”
“American voters are smart, and they know that showing an ID to vote is a simple way to protect their ballots,” said Tiffany Justice, Heritage Action Executive Vice President. “Voting is a privilege of American citizenship, and it should be defended by commonsense measures that apply equally to all states. Allowing non-citizens to cancel out the votes of law-abiding Americans threatens the very foundation of our republic.”
For this study, MRC analysts looked at the broadcast evening (ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News), morning news shows (ABC’s Good Morning America, CBS Mornings, NBC Today) from February 11 through the morning of March 6.
