During a Sunday appearance with ABC’s Jonathan Karl, California Democrat Adam Schiff completely lost it after being pressed on an issue that the overwhelming majority of Americans — including Democrats — support.
Schiff was asked about a new, major poll that found a majority of Americans support requiring photo ID to vote.
However, Schiff believed this would turn off voters, despite its widespread popularity.
Schiff was pressed by Karl about whether Democrats and Republicans could reach a compromise on supporting showing photo ID when voting, as Republicans are pushing the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act.
“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. Almost half the country doesn’t have a passport, and I don’t know where many millions of people would even find a birth certificate,” Schiff responded.
Karl said he was asking Schiff a different question, specifically about whether he would support photo ID.
“But I was asking you a different question: photo ID. Because, as you know, let’s show there was a recent poll, there’s been a lot of polls on this, but in one recent Pew poll, 83% of adults support requiring photo ID to vote. Seventy-one percent of Democrats favor requiring photo ID,” Karl said.
“Is that something that you can support? And if not, why?”
Schiff argued that it would still “disenfranchise” people.
“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,” Schiff said.
Take a listen —
Voter ID requirements have been repeatedly raised by the GOP while some Democrat leaders (like Schiff) claim it would allow Republicans to suppress votes.
Polls, however, have indicated that even Democrats are in support of having some form of identification required when voting in person.
A study conducted by the Pew Research Center in August 2025 found that 83% of those surveyed supported requiring all voters to show government-issued photo identification to vote.
Among those who agreed, 71% were Democrats and 95% were Republicans.