Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Lakshya Jain: Thanks for having me.
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): The people elected me in a landslide with every single ... We won every swing state. We won everything there is to win by big numbers. Not only swing state, we won the popular vote by millions of votes. They elected me. This was a number-one issue. And now we have judges that are radicalized and they’re crazy. Because they want us to have ... If you believe this, they want us to have a trial for every person that came in illegally into our country. So they come into our country illegally and then we’re supposed to take weeks, I guess, and months to have a trial on every criminal that we have, murderers all over the country? I don’t think the Supreme Court will stand for that, and I can’t believe it. Because you know what? If they do, we’re not going to have a country.
Jain: It’s funny that Trump is choosing this, of all the issues, because if you had to pick an issue on which the Democratic Party is just not trusted at all by the American public, it would be immigration. That is an issue where Democrats are far and away way less trusted historically and recently than the Republican Party. Yet this is the one particular case where if you have to fight about immigration as a Democrat, this is probably the case to do it because the specifics of it are really bad for Trump. And it’s not due to anything about Abrego Garcia as a person. It has to do with the fact that a lot of American voters just believe that the Trump administration is overstepping their constitutional authority here, even as they may give him the benefit of the doubt slightly on immigration. This is one case where even that approach gets pushed and they’re like, Hold on. No, this is a little bit too far for us.
Jain: It does. It plainly does. I think we’ve seen this over and again. It’s just one of those things where the specifics of the issue are really bad for the Republicans, because denying people due process has never gone down well with the American public. And I think that’s a large part of the reason why Trump, when he raises the salience of this ... Well, he’s already getting slammed by the American public on stuff to do with economics, stuff to do with taxes. He’s already losing their trust. This is not something where they’re giving him really favorable marks, partly because they’re mad at everything else and partly because he’s picking the wrong angle to fight on.
Karl Rove (audio voiceover): ... Going out there and saying, for example, This guy from Maryland, I don’t know whether he’s a good guy or a bad guy. I don’t know if he’s a gang member or not. But the fact is, bring him back to the United States, lay out the facts in a court of law, and get it done. It does no good to let that thing go out there for four or five weeks and eat away at the president’s approval on immigration. Take a look at the difference between approval ratings on the border, where he is in positive territory by good margin, and handling the issue of immigration, which includes these other things. It’s significantly less, and he’s upside down.
Jain: Yeah, I think Karl Rove is correct here, which is crazy for me as a Democrat to say. I never thought I’d be saying I agree with Karl Rove, but he is correct that Trump’s handling of the Garcia case is actually eroding his standing on the immigration issue. And it’s gotten to the point where he’s actually, I would say, lost his edge on immigration entirely. If you look at the numbers, if you look at the data—whether it’s the Times/Siena poll, whether it’s Blue Rose’s data—everywhere shows Donald Trump is not popular in immigration any longer. And I think a large part of the reason is because he’s insistent on fighting the angle that migrants do not deserve due process. And that, people start to get a little bit queasy with. They may not like migrants being here, but they also don’t like the attitude of deporting them without a hearing. That seems to be a little bit of an overstep.
Jain: Yeah, and I think some of this comes down to the veil of invincibility that the Trump administration has been operating with. A lot of it has come down to them saying, Well, we won the election so we can do what we want. And if anything showed us from 2016 to 2020 and then 2020 to 2024, it’s that the American public forgives a lot. And while they may be, in a sense, right that the American public is inclined to forgive a lot, that’s usually not something that’s true if the economy is going poorly. Once that happens, you start losing all types of battles everywhere. Because voters, when they’re mad, [it’s] you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. This is also part of why you see Kamala Harris’s declining numbers throughout the campaign. It’s partly because of this: Voters are mad at Biden and they were like, Well, we’re not going to give her the benefit of the doubt on anything.
Sargent: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. I want to highlight one other thing from Rove from that clip we listened to, because it’s key the distinction he made between the border and immigration as separate issues. Trump is all about trying to conflate these two, so everything is always about the border, the border, the border, we have to have a secure border. But it’s absolutely right that immigration is its own issue in the sense that it turns on questions like, What do we do about undocumented immigrants in this country right now? What do we do about the Dreamers? What do we do about Abrego Garcia, and so forth?
Jain: It is. It’s very striking to me too. The border as an issue is basically the Republicans’ old reliable; it’s their old faithful. If you start losing the trust advantage on that, you’re losing one of the issues that propelled the party to the White House again, that gave them control of Congress, and that actually powered a lot of their gains in the southern border region of the U.S. So it’s worrying if you’re the Republican Party and you’re suddenly seeing that your president is losing the issue advantage on this type of thing. How are you going to hold on to all of your new voters?
Sargent: Exactly. Voted on cost of living.
Sargent: Well, I want to read some more data out from G. Elliott Morris, who’s a data analyst as well, and I want to try to get at a particular thing about this issue—which is that the polling on deportations is really, really screwed up. We often get public polls which do something along the lines of saying, OK, do you think undocumented immigrants should be deported, yes or no? And you often get a majority saying yes, because what is being offered to them is a choice of law being enforced versus law not being enforced. But when you start digging into the specifics, you get something different. G. Elliott Morris found that on the question of deporting undocumented immigrants who have lived in the U.S. for more than 10 years, 37 points underwater; deporting undocumented immigrants who are parents of U.S. citizens by birth, 36 points underwater; deporting undocumented immigrants who have not broken laws in the U.S. except for immigration laws, 18 points underwater; and so forth.
Jain: Well, I’ve said for a long time, Greg, I think issue polling is in many ways broken in America. And that’s not to say that positions that are unpopular are popular, or that positions that are popular are actually unpopular. I think issue polling is in general broken in the way it’s conducted, broken in the way we use it.
And I think the Garcia case is a perfect example. Because had you polled right after the election, Do you think migrants with suspected gang ties should be sent to a foreign prison, even if it circumvents due process? I think you could probably get better poll numbers than what you’re getting right now. The thing is, when it’s actually implemented and people realize what’s going on, they react very differently, because issue polling cannot really properly capture the attitudes of the public until it’s properly elevated into the mainstream—unless you’re very careful with how you phrase it. Abortion is another great example of this, by the way.
It seems to me, Lakshya—and I want to ask you about this—that if they don’t do that, they actually play into Trump’s hands in the following way. Trump and Stephen Miller, again, want everything to be about the border. They want everything to be about crime, right? We need unshackled power; otherwise, we won’t be able to get public safety under control. If Democrats don’t engage on the issue, they let Stephen Miller and Trump frame it that way. Whereas when they point out the specific things that Trump is doing, they make it harder for Trump and Stephen Miller to move the subject to something that favors them. What do you think? Am I right or wrong about that?
Now, secondly, Greg, to your point, I think that you’re not going to turn a 30–70 issue into a 70–31 from engaging on it, and this is the mistake that a lot of activists and organizers make. But I also think that when an issue is 50–50, you can eat away into the president’s support with a critical block of voters if you can frame it correctly and if you can go on the offensive. I think public opinion is malleable to some degree. And the realities of the case are really bad for Trump to the point where I do think that if Democrats were smart in how they engaged on it and avoided the emotional appeals and just stuck to, This is a violation of due process rights, they could not only make some gains but also neutralize the trust advantage that Republicans enjoy on a very pertinent and potent issue. Which I think is critical because otherwise this is always going to come up.
Sargent: And as Karl Rove is warning, it’s actually eroding, that broader support on immigration generally. Just to close this out, Lakshya, what do you think of this proposal to pay undocumented immigrants $1,000 to self-deport? I want to point out before we get to your answer, we’re back to Mitt Romney’s 2012 position. People may forget this, but in those days, the Republican position was self-deport, not end due process completely. It looks to me like this is not something the middle of the country will go for: handing taxpayer money to undocumented immigrants who might have jobs here, who might have roles in communities, who might be, at this point, pretty Americanized to leave. I don’t see it. What do you think?
I think the mistake here is mostly that when our party—I say our because I’m a Democrat—sees this type of suggestion of ... It’s absurd on its face, paying immigrants $1,000 to self-deport. Firstly, that’s not nearly enough financial incentive to get someone to leave the United States of America for their home country. And secondly, it’s a ridiculous idea in implementation, conceptualization, and how it would even work. But if you start going with the angle of, “This is abominable because no human is illegal,” understand that battle’s already been lost. We’ve lost that battle over and again in the court of public opinion. What we haven’t lost on is that this guy is wasting taxpayer money at a time when money is already tight for the American people. Why are you doing that instead of fining them $5,000? Instead of rewarding them, say, Hey, you’re fined $5,000, now go to the back of the line. Maybe we can give you a work permit, but you’re going to have to start over again.
Jain: Thanks, Greg.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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