Sure, a majority of Californians support a proposal that would compel Golden State voters to produce identification at the polls or to vote by mail, but Democratic power brokers and public sector unions oppose it. You can probably guess which side Democratic California gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra took.

“Becerra and state Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, a fellow Democrat, will fundraise for the effort as honorary co-chairs of a committee to oppose Proposition 39,” Politico reported this week.

The outlet’s reporters acknowledged the general popularity of voter ID — not just in California but nationally, too. And yet Politico’s dispatch observed that voters were willing to change their outlook after they “heard partisan messaging around the initiative.” If Becerra is any indication, all Californians need to hear about the measure is that Trump is for it. “Donald Trump’s election rigging has no place in California,” the candidate exclaimed recently. “Prop 39 is his playbook coming to California.” Other Democrats connected to machine politics in the state have inveighed similarly against the “far-right MAGA activists” pushing voter ID in the effort to trigger a reliable partisan reflex.

The forces arrayed against voter ID in California are raising great gobs of money so as to remind voters that they hate the president and thus should be willing to subordinate election integrity to that animus. It’s a lot of work to go through just for Democrats to tell a majority of the state’s voters that they’re wrong.

But some on the left have lost their enthusiasm for the fight against voter ID. As James Carville confessed, “we are not going to win the war against some kind of ID,” even if the voter fraud it’s designed to combat “barely exists.” That it “exists” — even if only “barely” — is a necessary concession to the fact that it’s no longer possible to dismiss the phenomenon of illegal noncitizen voting as the product of fevered right-wing imaginations.