Here is the trade being offered from the White House, in plain kitchen-table terms: your housing law for his elections bill. Friday morning the president announced he will not sign the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act - 'in PROTEST,' he wrote, that the Senate has not passed his SAVE America Act, 'which is polling at 97% with the Republican Party, and very high with the non-politician Dumocrats' [1]. The housing law, he added, is 'a yawn' and 'so unimportant' [2].
Check the price tag on the hostage first. The 'yawn' is the Scott-Warren housing package - Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina; Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts - which passed the Senate 85 to 5 and the House 358 to 32 [2]. Along with streamlining the reviews that slow homebuilding, it does something no federal law has done: it bars corporations that own 350 or more single-family homes from buying another one, at a fine of 1 million dollars or three times the purchase price, whichever is greater [5]. If you have bid on a starter home against an LLC with a checkbook the size of a pension fund, this law is about you. In metro Atlanta, corporate investors own more than 70,000 single-family rentals - over one in four rental homes in the metro, the highest share in the country [5].
Now check the 97 percent, because that number is doing all the work in the trade. No public poll shows it. The Economist/YouGov poll of the SAVE Act's provisions found Republicans at 91 percent - on the proof-of-citizenship piece alone [3]. The bill's other core provision, ending most mail-in voting, polls at 41 percent support and 44 percent opposition among all Americans, with Democrats opposed 76 to 14 [3] - which retires the 'very high with the non-politician Dumocrats' claim on contact. The most generous number anyone has printed belongs to the White House itself, whose own March release celebrating the bill claimed 71 percent [4]. When your own press shop's best number is 26 points below your post, the post is not rounding. It is inventing.
Data
| The claim: polling at 97% | 97% support |
|---|---|
| WH own release (Harris poll) | 71% support |
| GOP, proof-of-citizenship (YouGov) | 91% support |
| Overall, mail-ballot ban (YouGov) | 41% support |
The good news is the hostage walks free anyway. Under the Constitution, a bill the president neither signs nor vetoes becomes law on its own after ten days, Sundays excepted - this weekend, for this law [2]. Even the Republican Speaker declined to play along: 'If he doesn't, it's still law. We'll still celebrate it' [2]. What the refusal actually buys is a message, and Chuck Schumer read it out loud: 'His priorities couldn't be clearer: higher cost for families and more power for himself' [2].
Keep the two halves of this one together, because each explains the other. A president cannot stop a law that 85 senators want, so he brands it worthless on the way past. A contested elections bill cannot clear the Senate on its real numbers - 41 percent for the mail-ban among the people it would govern - so it gets assigned a 97 that no pollster has ever measured. The housing law will outlive the post. The number will not survive this article.
