The Democratic Party turned hard right on immigration in recent years, endorsing Trump’s policy on the floor of Congress, because they are a bunch of fucking idiots who don’t understand issue polling or politics or the 21st century in general. I’ll admit that if you go back and read some of my stuff from 2019, I didn’t understand issue polling either. Lefties like me looked at the huge Democratic and Independent majorities in favor of Medicare for All and assumed that was paving Bernie Sanders’ path to the White House.
There is a vast chasm between issue polling and its effect on people’s voting preferences. As the early Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez vs. Kamala Harris 2028 Democratic Primary proves, your policies can poll at 100,000 percent with everyone on planet earth but if no one knows your name, they will vote for the names they do know. Politics in America can be complex sometimes, but also frighteningly simple.
Immigration has long been Trump’s best issue among Americans in polls, because it is emblematic of how he knows us better than we know ourselves. Both Bernie and Trump gained popularity among similar voters in 2016 (but not in 2020) by talking about the trade deals America had negotiated which undercut American manufacturing and other jobs that powered the middle class through the 20th century. Only Trump connected that to America’s ugly racist id through the American classic “[insert feared immigrant of this era] is taking your job,” and his success compared to Bernie who rightly blamed the billionaires who lobbied for those trade deals that outsourced American jobs for cheaper and less regulated foreign labor is a depressing commentary on our politics in general.
But Americans are much savvier than binary issue polling gives us credit for. And certainly savvier than either party believes us to be. The famed brave anonymous Democrat that Semafor’s Dave Weigel is right to say has no credibility and thus is not worth listening to is again raising their meek little voice lamenting the fact that some Democrats are revealing a moral compass right now. Senators Chris Van Hollen and Cory Booker are traveling to Trump’s concentration camp in El Salvador to try to free Abrego Garcia and others and shine a light on the signature issue of the day proving that the very concept of America is seriously at risk, and a coward who is too cowardly to put their name to their words is whining about this trip and telling Make Democrats Mad Weekly that “we’re going to take the bait for one hairdresser.”
These kinds of cowardly Democrats are who must be purged from this party if we are ever to make good on America’s founding promise. Not only do these empty suits lack any moral compass, but they’re fucking wimps who under the right circumstances would undoubtedly deepthroat Trump’s boot on camera and then thank him for the honor of doing it. People like the classic brave anonymous Democrat leaking to Make Democrats Mad Weekly are comprehensive failures, as they don’t even understand the immigration polling that makes them wet their diapers, let alone the concept of morality.
This is a gross generalization, but you can see it for yourself in every single immigration poll on Trump’s policies ever. They all read something like:
DO YOU APPROVE OR DISAPPROVE OF TRUMP’S IMMIGRATION POLICIES?
Approve: 48%
Disapprove: 43%
DO YOU APPROVE OF THEM IF IT SEPARATES FAMILIES?
Approve: 38%
Disapprove: 51%
DO YOU APPROVE OF THEM IF THEY REMOVE LEGAL RESIDENTS OF THE U.S.?
Approve: 26%
Disapprove: 65%
DO YOU APPROVE OF THEM IF TRUMP KICKS PUPPIES WHILE DOING IT?
Approve: 12%
Disapprove: 87%
Issue polling is not the end-all, be-all of politics, despite the Democratic Party outsourcing their entire brain and spines to it for the last generation and thinking that popularism is some kind of new concept they just invented. How you ask a poll question has a massive impact on people’s response, and there is no binary way to interpret this stuff no matter how much the Matt Yglesias’ and John Fetterman’s of the world want to believe that pointing to the largest numbers and saying “do that” is how you win elections. If it was, Yglesias would currently be writing anti-President Bernie screeds as the Green New Deal accomplished everything he ever wanted to do but never could.
The best way to interpret issue polling, like any data, is with more data. One poll does not make a trend but many of them over time all pointing in the same direction is something worth paying attention to. Taking the questions devised by political scientists at face value as a literal guidepost is where the Democratic consultant small brains exist, but every good wannabe statistician knows that looking at them in the aggregate to try to identify broader trends is the only way to make any sense of the mess that is the median American voters’ politics.
As actual statistician and pollster G. Elliot Morris wrote in a must-read piece yesterday and which I want to echo today: Trump’s immigration agenda isn’t popular! Throwing people into foreign gulags is not something Americans like, and there is a very clear trend taking place with the polling of a man currently getting the worst marks he has ever received on the economy.
A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll that Morris highlights paints some specifics on the gross generalization I wrote above, as 82 percent of Americans think that Trump should obey federal court rulings even if he disagrees with them, exactly what is happening right now with Abrego Garcia’s case that Sen. Van Hollen is traveling to El Salvador for. A filibuster-proof majority of Republicans agree with that statement at 68 percent. What number would that have to get to for the classic brave anonymous Democrat to think that cowering in the corner wasn’t their best strategy?
Morris compiled data on “net support for selected immigration policies in polls conducted between Jan 9. 2025 and Feb. 28 2025” and found that the only ones with net positive support are “deport undocumented immigrants who have been accused of committing violent crime” (+81) and “an executive order declaring an emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border, promising to deploy troops, construct additional border barriers, and implement mass deportations” (+11). The other ten immigration policies that Morris tracked over this period turned net negative, and they all describe exactly what Trump is doing, even in Trump’s rosiest scenarios he’s lying about like “deporting U.S. citizens convicted of crimes to foreign prisons,” which is minus 11 over the same period he has human trafficked citizens not convicted of crimes to a foreign prison.
The polling on immigration is and always has been complex because a lot of people’s responses and feelings on it aren’t really about immigration, as Trump savvily demonstrated in 2016 along with other demagogues of our past. Not to mention, it has been warped by Fox News and company spinning up an invented panic about it every single election cycle of my 38-year lifetime to little to no substantive pushback every year as the Democrats and our bothsides media continually beclowned themselves in the face of these lies. That the Democrats still have not come up with a strategy for Newt Gingrich is an indictment on an entire generation of cowards unfit for governance, and there is a massive opportunity for politicians like Senator Van Hollen to take the realities that have always existed deeper in Trump’s immigration polling to the top of it. This is the strategy another man who the Democrats could not figure out employed against them to great success, as George W. Bush advisor Karl Rove famously believes that turning your opponent’s strengths into weaknesses is how to win elections.
It’s difficult to argue with his results, and there’s a real savvy logic to disarming your opponent on their way into battle. That the Democrats have pursued the opposite strategy of entirely conceding on what they perceive to be GOP strengths helped get us here. Trump seems more powerful than he really is only because the Democrats are that gobsmackingly weak in contrast. As Harvard just demonstrated as well as many others throughout history, when you push back against this bully, he shows his true colors and his bluster loses a lot of its luster.
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