The summer exit confirmed what had been apparent for weeks: that Republicans lacked the votes to pass the voting restrictions the president has made a top priority.
Reporting from the Capitol, freshly abandoned by senators who have departed for their summer recess.
The Senate bowed to political reality at 4:36 a.m. on Saturday, adjourning and allowing bleary-eyed senators to leave Washington without any concrete steps toward passing the voting restriction bill that President Trump has demanded for months.
Republican lawmakers had insisted they would work tirelessly to enact election changes that Mr. Trump has suggested the party needs in place to win the midterm elections. Instead, they departed with little to show for their efforts, other than a performative pre-dawn procedural vote on a watered-down version of the bill that they knew they could not pass.
Even the staunchest advocates of the election measure eventually conceded what had been clear all along: There was simply not enough Republican support to push through the strict voter identification legislation. With the party’s majority at risk, senators were eager to abandon the futile effort so they could get home to their states to campaign for re-election.
“We are not in a position right now where we have the wherewithal to pass it right now,” Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah and one of the most forceful proponents of the legislation, said on Friday night.
Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, had been making that case for months, alluding in increasingly blunt terms to “math” and “reality” that he suggested the president simply did not appreciate as Mr. Trump angrily demanded the Senate find a way to pass the elections bill.
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