There’s a mini-debate among Democrats at the moment over the propriety of fighting against the deportation and imprisonment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia when other issues beckon, and I made my own thoughts known at New York:
As the story of the abduction, deportation, and detention of Kilmar Abrego Garcia plays out in El Salvador and U.S. federal courts, the politics of the situation are roiling many waters. For the most part, Republicans are following President Trump’s lead in wallowing in the misery of Abrego Garcia and other deportees; exploiting unrelated “angel moms” and other symbols of random undocumented-immigrant crimes; and blasting Democrats for their misplaced sympathy for the “wrong people.” Even as Team Trump risks a constitutional crisis by evading judicial orders to grant due process to the people ICE is snatching off the streets, it seems confident that public backing for the administration’s mass-deportation program and “border security” initiatives generally will make this a winning issue for the GOP.
For their part, Democrats aren’t as united politically on the salience of this dispute, even though virtually all of them object in principle to Trump’s lawless conduct. Most notably, California governor and likely 2028 presidential contender Gavin Newsom warned against dwelling on it, as The Bulwark reported:
“Asked to comment on the ongoing standoff between Trump, El Salvador, and the U.S. judicial system, Newsom scoffed. ‘You know, this is the distraction of the day,’ he said. ‘This is the debate they want. This is their 80-20 issue, as they’ve described it …’
“’Those that believe in the rule of law are defending it. But it’s a tough case, because people are really — are they defending MS-13? Are they defending, you know, someone who’s out of sight, out of mind in El Salvador? … It’s exactly the debate [Republicans] want, because they don’t want this debate on the tariffs. They don’t want to be accountable to markets today … They want to have this conversation. Don’t get distracted by distractions. We’re all perfect sheep.’”
Newsom is reflecting an ancient Democratic “populist” prejudice against non-economic messaging, which was revived by the 2024 presidential election, in which warnings about the threat to democracy and to the rule of law posed by Trump were widely adjudged to have failed to sway an electorate focused obsessively on the economy and the cost of living. And it’s true that the Abrego Garcia case arose precisely as Trump made himself highly vulnerable on the economy with his wild tariff schemes.
But the emotions aroused by the administration’s cruelty and arrogance in launching its mass-deportation initiative have struck chords with major elements of the Democratic base, particularly among those attuned to the constitutional issues involved. And it’s not a secret that even though Trump enjoys generally positive approval ratings on his handling of immigration issues, they begin to erode when specifics are polled. It’s also quite likely that whatever the overall numbers show, deportation overreach will hurt Trump and his party precisely in the immigrant-adjacent elements of the electorate in which he made crucial 2024 gains.
Personally, I’ve never been a fan of communications strategies that turn message discipline into message bondage, persuading political gabbers and writers to grind away on a single note and ignore other opportunities and challenges. In the current situation facing Democrats, strategic silence on a volatile issue like immigration (which was arguably one of Kamala Harris’s problems during the 2024 campaign) enables the opposition to fill in the blanks with invidious characterizations. In politics, silence is almost never golden.
Perhaps more to the point, as G. Elliot Morris argues, there are ways to link messages on different issues that reinforce them all:
“One way to focus messaging on both the economy and immigration, for example, might be to show how unchecked executive power is dangerous. After all the most unpopular parts of Trump’s agenda — tariffs and deportations for undocumented migrants who have been here a long time and committed no crimes — are a direct result of executive overreach.
“The power that gives Trump the ability to levy extreme tariffs was given to the president when Congress expected him to be forgiving of tariffs on an individual basis as an act of diplomacy, not to plunge the world economic order into crisis. Similarly, the judiciary has said Trump’s deporting of Abrego Garcia, as well as hundreds of Venezuelans, runs afoul of multiple Court orders.”
Even if you conclude that “unchecked executive power” is too abstract a line of attack for today’s paycheck-focused swing voters, it shouldn’t be that difficult to hit two messages simultaneously, particularly since the message on Trump’s tariffs doesn’t require a whole lot of reiteration from Democrats: Voters can see it in the stock market, and soon enough they will likely see it in the prices they are paying for goods and services.
But the real clincher in persuading Democrats to take the Abrego Garcia case very seriously is this: Anything less than full-throated opposition to the administration’s joyful embrace of Gestapo tactics and un-American policies in deportation cases will undoubtedly dishearten constituents who already fear their elected officials are unprincipled cynics who won’t lift a finger to fight Trump without first convening a focus group of tuned-out swing voters. Politicians don’t have to emulate Senator Chris Van Hollen’s decision to fly down to El Salvador and meet with his imprisoned constituent to recognize that his willingness to do so was impressive and authentic. As he told my colleague Benjamin Hart in an interview earlier this week, “The issue here is protecting the rights of individuals under our Constitution … I do believe this is a place that we need to stand up and fight.” It’s hard to do anything else without shame.
A couple of points on this from Wm. Saletan during the 2000 election:
“On its Web site, Gallup makes clear that its poll seeks to maximize daily change: “Our objective is to pick up movements up and down in reaction to the day-to-day events of the campaign.” ”
— also —
“CNN and USA Today are in the news business. They’re paying Gallup for new numbers every day. If Gallup’s numbers don’t change, where’s the news? So Gallup has an incentive to keep its filter loose, allowing the winds of shifting partisan intensity to blow its numbers back and forth.”
Today (Oct 25) Prez Track , Rasmussen’s
site , shows Kerry ahead for the first time
since late August.
Mr. Abramowitz:
I don’t think these results necessarily indicate random fluctuations. Maybe the likely voter screens are working as might be expected: screening out the less intense, less informed late-to-tune-in crowd 3 or more weeks out from the election, and then screening them in as the election nears and their attention sharpens.
I disagree, in part. Some, but not all, of the fluctuations in the tracking polls are simply statistical noise.
Polls that fix the number of Democrats and Republicans in the sample should have less sampling error. Zogby and Rasmussen do so, and they have smaller day-to-day fluctuations. The sampling error MOE with fixed party ID for 3000 respondents (Rasmussen) is around 1.2% and for 1200 respondents (Zogby) it’s around 1.9%. The range of fluctuations for both of these polls since a few days after the last debate has been slightly larger than these numbers. (There is random error due to estimation of weighting coefficients, and there were no doubt oscillations in actual voter preference that were too small to pull out of the statistical noise.)
However, Rasmussen’s result today of 48.4% for Kerry exceeds the average of the preceding 15 days by 2.3%. This is almost 4 standard deviations and seems to represent real movement.
The statistical significance of Zogby’s move in the opposite direction over the last few days is harder to judge, partly because Zogby doesn’t give results in tenth of a percent.
Polls that don’t fix party ID have bigger sampling error. The Wash. Post’s poll oscillations seem to be just slightly larger than the sampling error, although I can’t calculate exactly because they partially adjust for party ID and because they sometimes average over 3 days and sometimes over 4. (Their RV MOE would be about 2.1% if there were no party ID weighting at all.)
When polls move together, of course, it has statistical meaning even if the polls taken one-at-a-time could be random movements. If Zogby jumps more Democratic over the next couple of days (as is likely, because two very pro-Bush days will fall out of the sample), and the Post and Rasmussen stay more or less the same, or if Zogby and Rasmussen stay the same and the Post trends more Kerry (which would bring it out of the sampling error range), we will have a clear trend.
Oct. 25, Rassmussen has Kerry ahead of Bush for the first time since August.
Relax, have faith, we are not alone, ignore all polls if your nerves can’t take it and GOTV!!!
I hate to say this, but if everyone had a hunch their polls were not making sense then fudging (er… fine tuning) the methods in ways that eventually overcompensates would also create the described effect.