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.
PEW and Andy Kohut had the race right on… with this pre-election prediction release…
check it out peoplepress.org
Not so much horse and buggy huh?
Mady..about Zogby, Kerry had a lead last week. Bush had a lead at the end of last week/ the beginning of this one. Now its tied. Indicates that the race is pretty stable right now in a tie.
ABC WaPo is easy. Look at their registered voter data. A huge change 3 days ago from a pretty even split to about a 6 point spread that is fairly stable over 3 days. Indicates to me a pretty big Bush outlier came on 3 days ago, and since then we’ve had 48-47 or so splits. When that big day rolls off, it’ll move closer to tied again. It’s a 4 day moving average, so I expect one more bad spread for us and then, bam, back to normal.
Mady –
One clear difference between the Washington Post/ABC poll and all other polls whose methods I’ve seen described in sufficient detail is that the Post/ABC poll does not weight respondents for Hispanic origin. Hispanics are, as far as I can tell, lumped in with whites.
I would expect that Hispanics with high school education or less would have an extremely low rate of participation in a poll, because of long working hours and language barrier. (Even if you speak a non-native language reasonably well, do you speak it well enough to feel like doing a 20-minutes telephone interview?) The non-participating low-education Hispanics are replaced, due to the weighting process, with low-education whites who (at least in the income-biased sample produced by polling methods) tend slightly toward Bush.
(Note that the ABC weighting method — I haven’t seen the details of the Post’s — is different from most other polls. I called it “cell-weighting” in an earlier post. The more usual weighting method, which I called “parameter weighting,” will also underrepresent low-education Hispanics in the final results, but they will be replaced by a mixture of low-education whites and blacks and more educated Hispanics. This, I would guess, will also bias results against Kerry, but to a substantially lesser degree.)
I think this will be remembered as the year when polls were shown to be living in the horse and buggy world, while the US had moved on to autos.
The polls are measuring a universe that cannot be measured by phone polls pressed into 2-3 day chunks of time in samples that total 1000 and don’t look remotely like the electorate.
Two items:
1. I was going to ask the same question as a previous post: why is the WP/ABC poll so different? Even on registereds, it showed a 7-point Bush lead today, I think…
2. Any idea how many new folks might come out in FLA on the minimum wage referendum? That’s a huge potential swing for Kerry, it seems to me…
Keep up the good work — love this site!!
eg
Yes.
What’s different is the intensity around the election – it’s so high. We Dems want the polls to reassure us, to give us a moment of hope, a moment of reprieve from this crushing Republican control of the Executive, the Legislative and seemingly the Judiciary.
We fear we will lose in Florida again. We fear that the Supreme Court will decide it all again. We fear that we’ll lose because we didn’t get that one more vote out in Minnesota or Ohio or New Mexico. The closeness of the 2000 election, the division in the country, the obsessive news coverage of the coverage of the coverage of the election and the pundits talking about the polls and the insane number of little instant polls and the blogs and the emails and the talk radio and and and . . . It’s hard to keep positive and to think all of our little-door-knocks and small contributions will add up to getting rid of a horrible, horrible president.
I mean – if Kerry wins, it will be the first time since Paul Wellstone won in Minnesota that I can say it was the work of all of us ordinary people doing what we can in the crevices of our work-a-day lives. That would be a pretty big wish come true –
It’s not that no one cared about Gore or Bush as candidates, no one really cared about the election – until, of course, that final day in Florida when it all blew up and then there was Kyoto and ABM and September 11 and Iraq and we all realized how wrong we had been not to work as hard as we could in Fall 2000.
Kerry in a landslide –
Two things:
First of all, I find it alarming that Kerry has not led at all in any recent Zogby polls. Yes, they do waver, but never to Kerry getting a majority percentage.
Also, could anyone explain the methodology of the Washington Post/ABC tracking poll, and why, in a time when very few polls show results that favor Kerry, but most show a quite close race, the Post has been showing Bush consistently at 50% or over. Today it shows, I think, 51 Bush, 45 Kerry.
Thanks,
Mady
Polling is definitely going through growing pains. You cite a number of reasons why polls vary (clearly, on election day most or all will have been wrong–if by wrong we mean to understand predicting the outcome).
I think the polls themselves may be part of the problem. We have respondent fatigue–not on an individual level, but as a nation. Look at those so-called “undecideds.” I find it odd that their numbers have not declined significantly since June. My guess is that they’re not measuring conviction so much as fatigue. It seems like something between 5-10% of every poll are undecided. Wouldn’t we expect to see that decline as the electorate gets to know the candidates? But it hasn’t. My guess is that this group has just had it with pollsters. They’re decided, but they ain’t tellin’ us.
Also, it’s odd that Andy would make the argument about voter volatility when he himself has measured how strongly convinced so much of the electorate is.