Spin Cycle: Democrats Come Out Hard Against The Thing They Voted For In 2021

Two prominent Democrats — one in the House and one in the Senate — spoke out on Sunday against a move suggested by President Donald Trump even though both championed a similar move five years earlier when their party was in control.

For those who don’t spend their Sunday mornings glued to the television — and their Sunday afternoons attempting to dig through a week’s worth of network and cable news media spin — The Daily Wire has compiled a short summary of what you may have missed.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) both responded to President Trump’s wild suggestion that Republicans should “nationalize” voting, saying that laws dictating election procedures, constitutionally speaking, belonged to the individual states.

Trump sparked the debate with an apparently off-the-cuff comment during an interview with former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, when he said of the illegal aliens who’d flooded into the United States through former President Joe Biden’s open border, “If we don’t get them out, Republicans will never win another election.”

“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over.’ We should take over the voting, in at least, many, 15 places,” Trump added then. “The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

The White House later explained that Trump had been referring to states where he believed election fraud was a real problem, and the president has not previously pushed the notion of “nationalizing” voting — but that did not stop Jeffries and Schiff from running with the idea as if he had.

The House Minority Leader joined CNN anchor Dana Bash to discuss the situation on “State of the Union,” and she began by noting that Republicans had argued that passing the SAVE Act — which would require all voters in the United States to show proof of citizenship at the polls — was the best way to prevent voter fraud in any state.

“I understand that you don’t support things like a passport, for example,” Bash began. “But requiring basic ID in order to vote is really popular. A Pew poll from a few months ago showed 83% of Americans, including 71% of your fellow Democrats, support requiring an ID to vote. Why are they wrong?”

“I haven’t said that they’re wrong,” Jeffries insisted before explaining why he was still opposed to the measure. “We know that states are the ones that are empowered to conduct elections, and every state should be allowed to decide the best way to proceed to ensure that there’s a free and fair election.”

“The question is that — what Republicans are trying to do is to engage in clear and blatant voter suppression,” he added. “They know that if there’s a free and fair election in November, they’re going to lose! In fact, Republicans have been losing every single election since Donald Trump was sworn in in January of last year, including most recently, decisively, in Texas.”

Bash pressed again, asking whether it would be worth it, since Democrats favor voter ID laws as well, to “take that off the table” as a point of contention: “Maybe not a passport or a birth certificate, but show ID.”

“Every state is empowered to be able to make the decision on their own,” Jeffries protested. “What Donald Trump wants to do is try to nationalize the election. Translation: steal it. And we’re not going to let it happen.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries on Trump’s call for Republicans to “take over” running elections: “What Donald Trump wants to do is try to nationalize the election. Translation: steal it. And we’re not going to let it happen.” pic.twitter.com/jGflGaguAn

— State of the Union (@CNNSOTU) February 8, 2026

Schiff took a similar tone with “This Week” host Jonathan Karl, who asked the California Senator to explain what the president meant when he’d told Bongino he wanted to “nationalize” voting in certain places.

“Senator, what does he mean? What do you think he means?” Karl asked.

“I think he fully intends to subvert the elections,” Schiff declared. “He will do everything he can to suppress the vote.”

Schiff, who still has not provided the evidence he claimed to have regarding President Trump and Russian collusion, went on to insist that Trump would take action if he did not like how the elections played out: “He’s prepared to try to take some kind of action to overturn the result, and we really shouldn’t question that.”

Sen. Adam Schiff on President Trump’s call to “nationalize” state elections: “He’s prepared to try to take some kind of action to overturn the result, and we really shouldn’t question that.” https://t.co/mPgqzgikhs pic.twitter.com/qKxEiiUyuh

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) February 8, 2026

And yet both Jeffries and Schiff were all in when their own party pushed for national control over elections via 2021’s H.R. 1 — laughably nicknamed the “For the People Act.”

The bill’s purpose, according to the Democrats who wrote it, sounded reasonable enough: “To expand American’s access to the ballot box, reduce the influence of big money in politics, strengthen ethics rules for public servants, and implement other anti-corruption measures for the purpose of fortifying our democracy and for other purposes.”

But as former Manger of Election Law Reform Initiative at The Heritage Foundation Hans Von Spakovsky explained, what the bill would actually have done was pretty much the exact opposite of what its stated “purpose” suggested.

“A better description of it is that this bill would be a federal takeover and nationalization of the running and administration of elections, basically taking it away from the states,” he said. “It would change election rules to make it easier to cheat and easier to manipulate election results. And on the ethics and campaign finance rule changes, it’s designed to restrict and chill speech, political speech and political activity. So it’s just … this is one of the worst bills I’ve ever seen in my years in Washington.”