The demographics of voting

Once upon a time, which is to say before Trump got elected for the first time, there was a narrative of demographic inevitability in America. Many people believed that minorities would always vote for the Democrats, and that demographic trends would result in Republicans getting stuck with an ever dwindling voter base. Even the Republicans believed that, which is why they went for a strategy of making voting as hard as possible: Rich white people were believed to be able to overcome obstacles to voting better than poor black people.
A decade of elections since 2016 has pretty much disproved that model. Lots of voters from minorities voted for Trump. And Trumps most solid voter base might still be white, but also rural and often poor. So when I see the latest headlines of Trump still trying to keep people from voting, I wonder if he is just acting out of old habits, or whether Republican strategists calculated that this would still be advantageous. I could well imagine a situation where for example restrictions on voting by mail keep more rural voters from voting than urban voters, and that wouldn’t be to the Republican’s advantage.
Unfortunately that is one of these more on the ground things that are extremely hard to judge when you live on a different continent, even if you watch US news every day and keep up with politics. In none of the European countries I lived in it was possible to vote without your government-issued photo ID card, and these days that card even has biometric features. In Belgium either that ID card or a government app called ItsMe linked to that ID card is used for bloody everything. I get prescription drugs by showing my ID card at the pharmacy, I interact with authorities like tax or pensions by identifying either with the ID card or ItsMe, and even banks in Belgium now use ItsMe for online banking. Makes it a bit hard for me to judge how much of an obstacle showing a photo ID is for an American.Tobold's Blog