Long before most in the media were paying attention to illegal immigration and even before Americans woke up to the crisis at the border, I was arguing that those issues were shaping up to be major concerns for the one electoral demographic that really mattered: the voters. Two post-election analyses from the Democratic polling initiative “Blueprint” reveal how overwhelmingly important immigration was to the critical swings voters who delivered Trump’s victory – and to some surprising demographic groups.
June 2021
RealClear Politics publishes the results of various polls throughout the entirety of the Biden-Harris administration, including ones that register President Biden’s immigration approval ratings.
The last time that Biden received a net positive approval for his immigration performance was in June 2021, when he snagged a +4 rating in the Harvard/Harris poll, and a +2 in The Hill/Harris X poll that month. Thereafter, he was solidly in the red on the issue all the way up to the 2024 election.
As I pointed out that month, however, there were warning signs in the otherwise positive Harvard/Harris poll, with “immigration” coming in third (after “the economy/jobs” and the “coronavirus”) among voters’ top issues and with 81 percent of respondents opining that immigration was a “serious problem” (of whom 43 percent deeming it a “very serious” one).
Here was the biggest warning sign in that poll for me, however: That May, Border Patrol apprehended more than 172,000 aliens who had entered illegally at the Southwest border, then a 21-year high for that particular month (by May 2022, apprehensions topped 224,000, still an all-time monthly high for the month).
When polled, however, 71 percent of respondents wildly underestimated the number of monthly apprehensions: 21 percent said that there were fewer than 10,000 per month; 31 percent said between 10,000 and 50,000; and 19 percent believed that the actual monthly flow was in the vicinity of 50,000 to 100,000.
Just 7 percent correctly responded by stating that apprehensions were running at 150,000 to 200,000 per month, with 13 percent stating that the monthly total was 100,000 to 150,000.
When given the actual figure, 64 percent of respondents called on the Biden administration to “issue new, stricter policies to reduce the flow of people across” that border – which of course, would not happen for more than three years.
Most in the press weren’t covering the border, and it wasn’t until the middle of FY 2023 – with busloads of migrants arriving in northern cities creating fiscal and social crises and a series of high-profile migrant crimes occupying the headlines – that the American people realized how bad things there really were.
Even three-plus years ago, however, I knew that the actual scope of the problem would eventually push its way to the fore of the public’s attention, and boy was I right.
June 2024
By June 2024, “immigration” was the second most important issue among the nearly 1,600 U.S. adults polled by The Economist/YouGov that month, trailing only “inflation/prices”.
That was critical from an electoral standpoint because immigration was President Biden’s worst issue, with 62 percent of Americans disapproving of his performance on the issue compared to just 29 percent who approved.
Note that Biden’s approval in that (Democrat-heavy) poll was artificially bolstered by the fact that 60 percent of his fellow partisans favored his immigration performance, and just 29 percent of respondents in the Party of Jackson disapproved of the job he was doing on the issue.
Ominously for his electoral prospects, among Independents in that poll, Biden was 50 points down on immigration, with just 17 percent of the politically unaligned approving of the way he handled the issue and 67 percent disapproving.
A month later, of course, Biden withdrew his bid for reelection after a disastrous debate performance and threw his support behind his vice president, Kamala Harris.
Harris struggled to distinguish herself from Biden on immigration and the border, preferring instead to blame her Republican opponent for the crisis due to his opposition to a (seriously flawed) “bipartisan Senate border bill”.
The Blueprint Analyses
We now know, thanks to the post-election analyses from public opinion research initiative Blueprint, that Harris’s gambit didn’t pay off.
By way of background, as the group explained in a November 15 analysis:
Swing voters broke for Trump 52% versus just 38% for Harris. Nearly half of swing voters who chose Trump made their decision in the final weeks, including 27% in the final days (15% in the last week, 12% on Election Day), suggesting they were genuinely up for grabs. This is substantially later than swing voters who broke for Harris—just 15% of whom decided in the last week or on Election Day.
Given that Trump won the popular vote by just 1.6 percentage points (49.9 percent for the Trump/Vance ticket compared to 48.3 percent for Harris/Walz), the fact that Trump did so well with swing voters was key to his victory.
Among total swing voters who ultimately chose Trump, immigration was a key issue, with 77 percent of them believing that it was “extremely” or “very accurate” to say Democrats are “not tough enough on addressing the border crisis” and 73 percent feeling the same way about Democrats “support[ing] immigrants more than American citizens”.
Moreover, 73 percent of Trump-supporting swing voters thought it was either extremely or very accurate to state that Democrats “want to take money from hard-working Americans and give it to immigrants”, 72 percent of them believed it is fair to think Democrats “don’t care about securing the border”, and 69 percent concurred with the statement that Democrats “have extreme ideas about immigration”.
Of the 28 possible critiques swing voters who picked Trump may have had about Democrats, those five were at or near the top of their lists, and the complaint that Democrats weren’t tough enough on the border was the overall winner. The remaining immigration and border critiques came in third, fifth, seventh, and eighth, respectively.
“Reasons Voters Did Not Choose Harris”
The saliency of immigration and the border in the 2024 election is also demonstrated by an earlier Blueprint analysis, this one examining the saliency of various criticisms of Kamala Harris.
In that poll:
Respondents were presented with random pairs of potential reasons to vote against Harris and asked to select which reason they found more compelling. Each participant evaluated four pairs drawn from a pool of 25 distinct criticisms. The strength of each criticism was measured by how frequently it was chosen when presented as part of a pair. The relative importance is how much more it was selected than the average criticism.
. . .
This methodology allows us to efficiently rank the relative persuasiveness of different criticisms while minimizing survey fatigue and response bias.
The most popular criticism respondents chose for voting against the vice president was that “inflation was too high under the Biden-Harris administration”, picked 74 percent of the time it was presented randomly and thus assigned a “relative importance” of +24.
“Too many immigrants illegally crossed the border under the Biden-Harris administration” was the second most popular criticism of Harris, with a relative importance of +23 among all voters and swing voters, and +22 among Trump swing voters—as well as +19 among Black and Latino voters.
In other words, the migrant surge was among the top 2 reasons (again, out of 25) that voters chose for not supporting Kamala Harris.
Pollsters also offered respondents a separate criticism, that a President Harris “would let in too many immigrants”. That was the sixth most popular criticism, receiving a +27 among swing voters generally and swing voters who ultimately chose Trump—as well as a +11 from Latino voters.
As an interesting aside, Latino voters were swayed more by immigration criticisms in that poll than by social ones.
The third-most popular criticism overall was “Kamala Harris is more focused on cultural issues like transgender issues than helping the middle class”, which received a +17 from voters overall (and a +28 from swing voters who chose Trump, their most popular choice), but only a +9 from the Latino cohort.
That would appear to counter claims that Latino voters were uniquely swayed by religious objections to Harris (though Trump received 53 percent of votes cast by Latino Catholics and 64 percent cast by Latino Protestants according to other polling) or by Trump’s “machismo” – and bolster arguments that they, too, were concerned about mass immigration and economic issues.
In any event, contrast the overall responses to those immigration criticisms of Harris to the +/-0 offered in response to the criticism that job growth has been weak under the current administration, the -3 for the criticism that Harris didn’t run a good campaign, and the -5 she was “too soft on crime”, or even the -8 relative importance of the criticism that “Democrats did a bad job running the country”.
Democrats ignored early warning signs by maintaining immigration and border policies that were never popular with American voters until it was too late – which largely helps explain why voters chose a second helping of a Trump administration on November 5.