Donald Trump’s flagship SAVE Act is struggling to win broad public support, according to a new poll.
The 79-year-old president has been desperately pushing the Senate to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act after it passed the House in February.
The bill would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and would largely eliminate mail-in ballots in elections, a method that Trump has railed against, calling it a vehicle for “cheating” and mass fraud—despite using it himself to vote in a recent special election for the Florida state legislature.
But critics say the legislation would make it much harder to vote in a country where nearly half of residents do not own passports, and would require millions of Americans to re-register. As a result, it has stalled in the Senate.
And polling shows that public support for the legislation is lukewarm.
According to a new POLITICO poll, conducted between April 11-14 among 2,035 U.S. adults, 21 percent of Americans said they oppose the SAVE Act, while the same proportion said they neither support or oppose the bill. Another 21 percent said they don’t know.
That leaves just 37 percent who say they support the legislation. Support was largest amongst Trump voters, with 62 percent saying they support the SAVE Act. That is compared to only 25 percent of Kamala Harris voters.
Asked about specific provisions of the bill, 18 percent of Americans said they oppose requiring proof of citizenship when registering to vote, including when registering by mail. Thirty percent said they didn’t know or neither support or oppose the Act.
Overall, 52 percent said they support the requirement for proof of citizenship when registering to vote.
That includes 42 percent of voters who supported Kamala Harris in 2025, and 75 percent of Trump voters.
A slightly larger share of Americans—38 percent—say it would make elections fairer, compared with 32 percent who believe it would make them less fair, while 30 percent remain unsure.
Trump has been on a manic push to get the legislation through the Senate, driven by his longstanding claims that non-citizens are illegally voting in U.S. elections—despite there being hardly any examples of it actually occurring.
In 2025, the Michigan Department of State identified 15 cases of non-citizens voting in the 2024 presidential election, out of more than 5.7 million ballots cast—about 0.00028 percent.
Despite the rarity of such cases, Trump has continued to frame opposition to the bill as politically motivated, arguing that Democrats are resisting the measure because they want to allow illegal immigration to continue.
“Democrats are desperate to keep illegals, no matter how bad or dangerous they may be, in the Country. They want them to VOTE! That’s why they are fighting so hard to neutralize ICE. We will fight them all the way, and WIN,” Trump wrote in a 2 a.m. Truth Social post in March.
But the legislation faces a steep path in the Senate and is widely seen as unlikely to advance.
Every Democrat in the chamber has pledged opposition, leaving it well short of the 60 votes required to overcome a filibuster.
Even within the Republican Party, support is not unanimous. Four GOP senators—Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Thom Tillis, and Mitch McConnell—recently opposed a key amendment tied to the bill that would have helped the legislation get across the finish line.
