Has Mass Deportation Become A Domestic Vietnam For Trump, Vance, and Miller?
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Morning everyone. Lots to talk about today. Let’s get to it….
The terrible polls just keep coming for Trump. His overall approval is at or below his worst showing of this term, and in many he is now below where he was at this point in 2018, despite doing better in the 2024 election (which means he has fallen further, faster this time). The reason this matters, of course, is that in 2018 Democrats routed the Rs in the midterms, winning the national House vote by 8.6 points, one of the largest mid-term margins in the post-war era. It’s why we are favored to win the House this year, and the Senate, despite a very tough map, is in play. The electorate has shifted 8-10 points towards the Democrats since November of 2024, depending on the measure, which is why we are contesting states and districts that were +10 to +13 for Trump in 2024.
Here’s FiftyPlusOne’s generic ballot tracker. It’s moved from +3 R in early 2025 to +5 D today, a shift of 8 points. On CNN Harry Enten yesterday dove into a recent NBC News poll that pitted Harris against Trump now and she wins by 8. So a 9 point shift (watch the segment for even more data):
Here’s how the 2026 battleground states voted in 2024 (via Claude AI). So as you can see we should be pleased with where we are but we still have work to do:
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I want to drill down on two other poll results now. First, this rather remarkable graph from a new Reuters/Ipsos poll:
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The country has really turned not just on ICE, but on the whole Trump-Vance-Miller racist, white supremacist project that is the overarching ideological framework for Trumpism and his far right allies in Europe. As I showed in my new post, Standing Up For Our Neighbors, poll after poll has “mass deportation” now in the 20s and 30s, depending on how the question is asked, and nowhere near majority support. A new Morning Consult poll, a poll that has been more favorable to Trump than most other independent polls this year, has support for various aspect of his immigration agenda also topping out at 40%, and again showing 20s and 30s:
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What this data also shows us is how profoundly unhappy the public is with Trump’s core agenda of mass deportation and tariffs, and his lack of focus on making their lives better - the core promise of his 2024 campaign.
The reason I’m drilling down on all this today is that based on my reading of news coverage of the past few weeks I think Trump and the regime are in deep denial about how much the country has turned on their mass deportation agenda and the turning of ICE into a violent paramilitary force. We’ve seen references to the White House saying the anger about the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti would pass, or that they believe they are winning the stand off with Democrats on the reining in of ICE. I think mass deportation and the ICE expansion is so central to Trumpism that they cannot imagine or understand how profoundly it’s been rejected by the country.
For Tom Homan told us this week that there will be no let up on mass deportations. They are just beginning to tap into the hundreds of billions of dollars that ICE was given by their terrible bill. They are now just starting to purchase all these warehouses across the country to dramatically EXPAND their operations. Every day we keep learning about more atrocities, often involving young children. In their minds they are just getting started.
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Their problem of course is that the country has already withdrawn their support for mass deportations and ICE terror, and clearly want ICE to act within the law, to focus on criminals, and leave the rest of us alone. This has happened because regular people in Minnesota, in Illinois, in Los Angeles, in Portland, have shown extraordinary courage, bravery, and patriotism. The No Kings movement was already one of the largest mass mobilization movements in US history. It will now become supercharged by citizen-led opposition to their escalating mass detention and mass deportation all across the country.
Our strengthening opposition movement will be complemented by a growing rejection of the detention camps in red areas of the country by Republican politicians and Republican voters; of a growing rejection in red areas of the country of the damage mass deportation is having on the farm and rural economies, and small businesses; of a growing Republican strategist worry that Hispanic voters could ferociously turn on the Republican party like they did after prop 187 in California in the early 1990s and after a Republican House passed a mass deportation bill in the 2006 cycle. In both these cases extremist immigration policies caused an enormous backlash in the Hispanic community, and a big swing towards the Democrats. Here’s a summary of the two parties performances with Hispanic voters since the Prop 187 days, via my buddy Claude:
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Look at how similar the results are in 2004 and 2024. These are the only two elections where Republicans broke 40%. In 2005, a year after Bush made these big gains with Hispanic voters, the Republican House passed a mass deportation bill. Mass protests rose across the country. And our margin with Hispanic voters jumped from +9 in 2004 to +39 in 2006. What will it be this time, and how will a big swing towards Dems with Hispanic voters affect elections in critical battlegrounds like Arizona, California (new maps), Florida, Texas, and even places like Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania when the Hispanic electorate is far bigger today than it was in the early 1990s or 2006?
This week’s Economist/YouGov tracking poll has Trump’s job approval with Hispanic voters at 32%-62% (-30), a result that looks a lot more like all this other data up there, and a far cry from his 44%-54% (-10) result in the 2024 election. What should further worry Rs is that his YouGov poll almost certainly has a lower proportion of Spanish speaking or dominant Hispanics in its sample, voters who are almost certainly more Democratic and anti-Trump than English speakers. Which means that 32%-62% (-30) is probably -35 or even worse. Which starts looking a lot more like 2006 when Hispanics broke to us by 39 points and we flipped both the House and Senate that year.
I don’t think it is widely understood how significant these big swings of Hispanic voters against the Republican Party have been in the past generation of American politics. It has been a central driver of the biggest geographic shift in US politics in the last 30 years - the blueing of the Southwest and the West. California has gone from a state that gave us Nixon and Reagan to very blue. AZ, CO, NM, NV all went red in 2004 and are now much, much bluer - there isn’t a single Republican Senator in the region today. In the four Presidential elections after the 2006 swing of Hispanics towards the Democrats, the Democratic Party averaged 51% of the vote, our best showing in four Presidential elections since FDR’s four elections from 1932 to 1944.
The last two times Republicans went hard after the Hispanic community they paid a terrible price politically. Will that happen again in 2026? Sure seems likely.
Finally, I think the way Trump is looking at 2026 is that regardless of what is actually happening out there his STRENGTH and POWER; his superior campaign team that beat us in 2024 and will be at it again in 2026; his greater control over the media - CBS, TikTok, the Washington Post and LA Times, perhaps CNN; Putin hybrid warring for him against us again will allow him to bullshit his way to victory this November. But where I think where they miscalculated, badly, is that both Epstein and mass deportations/ICE have escaped containment, and continue to undermine, erode his standing - even his legitimacy. They’ve lost these consequential battles with the public, and will not be able to make these horrific things go away no matter how many shirtless TikTok videos Bobby Kennedy makes, or how many fishing boats he blows up on the high seas.
I think they are in denial about how much trouble they are in with the public, what a gargantuan mistake mass deportation has been, how something that had been arguably his greatest strength has become a debilitating weakness. So they are going ahead; the atrocities will continue, and will continue to garner national and international attention; and our opposition movement will keep documenting it all, keep fighting it all, and keep growing in strength and power. It is why our leaders must press hard now in this fight to rein in ICE, end mass deportation, stop the building of the detention camps. For in the fight we will grow more powerful, and he weaker; for we are winning this fight, and he is losing it; we are doing the right thing, he a terrible, terrible thing. But he cannot give up the fight for in doing so he would be giving up Trumpism itself. Which is why all this is starting to feel like a domestic Vietnam for him. He can no longer win, but he cannot stop fighting and will keep getting weaker and weaker along the way - and we cannot take the pressure off for one minute, no matter how many consultants tell us to pivot back to “kitchen table” issues……