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Millions of Americans are asking this question. Voter ID is one of the most overwhelmingly popular reforms in the country. According to Gallup, a stunning 84 percent of Americans support showing photo ID at the ballot box. Not only that, but 83 percent also want proof of citizenship when registering to vote. Strong majorities of Republicans, Independents and even Democrats want action.

But Congress is standing in the way. The SAVE Act, one of Republicans’ top priorities, is stalled in the Senate. Never mind that the GOP has a majority. Never mind that Democrats feel pressure from public opinion, too. They know they’re on the wrong side of this issue. But not a single Democrat feels compelled to help Republicans overcome a filibuster and pass voter ID.

Why does this keep happening to the Republican Party? Why can’t the GOP meaningfully change the country’s direction — especially when the public is decisively on their side?

The answer is what I call “the political vise.”

The reason Republicans keep getting stifled is because they’re being pressured from three different directions. On one side, they have the public, which strongly supports what the GOP is trying to do. But on the other two sides, the pressure is working against them. The media is almost completely hostile to everything Republicans want to accomplish. So are the elites who shape our cultural, economic and educational institutions.

The combination of these forces creates the vise that restricts Republicans. It doesn’t matter how much the public supports what they’re trying to do. The other two forces work even more powerfully in the other direction. At every turn, the media and the elites pressure squishy Republicans to cave. As for Democrats, they know the opinion shapers and cocktail party hand-shakers have their backs, no matter what. With such powerful friends, why bother doing what the public demands?

The political vise works in both directions. Democrats have long been more successful at advancing their agenda because the vise is looser when they’re in control. The media and the elites almost always give them cover, so much so that it doesn’t really matter if the public hates what Democrats do. Transgender boys playing girls sports? Green light. A nonexistent southern border? Go for it. Not even historically high levels of inflation can dissuade Democrats from their agenda, as the Biden years proved.

Nor are Democrats shamed into sensibility when the public revolts at the ballot box. They take comfort in the fact that the media and the elites cushioned the electoral blow, which could always be worse. They’re also confident that those two forces will constrain major Republican reforms. Most of all, Democrats are dead certain that their control of institutions guarantees long-term success. It’s why they so often talk about the “right side of history” — they assume the country will inevitably move left.

So long as the political vise works in this way, Democrats will advance their agenda while Republicans will largely be held to a standstill. The past 30-plus years prove it. If Republicans hope to flip the script, they need to take control of the political vise. And Donald Trump shows the way forward.

At first read, that may sound paradoxical. President Trump is currently constrained by the political vise, as clearly shown by the struggle to pass the SAVE Act. But he has also demonstrated a long-overdue Republican willingness to challenge the media and the elites. His crusade against higher education, his campaign against woke corporate activism, his complete willingness to bypass the press — he is showing the GOP how to break free from the political vise, even if it hasn’t happened yet.

Naturally, the media flips out at everything the president does. The elite institutions despise him, too. But their protests and whining about institutional norms — repeated ad nauseum by Democrats — show that he’s clearly struck a nerve. They recognize that Donald Trump is threatening the left’s control of America’s future. So they’re fighting back with all they have.

The question now is whether Republicans will win that fight. It doesn’t just depend on going after left-wing rags and elite institutions. Lasting progress depends on building new media companies that give Americans the truth and creating new institutions — from education to communities — that serve the people instead of the elites. On so many issues, not just voter ID, Republicans already have the people on their side. It’s not enough to break free of the political vise. Republicans need to take it back — and use it to move America forward.

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