As Republicans sort through the wreckage of a calamitous midterm election, loyalists are attempting to figure out whether GOP voters stayed home or switched their partisan loyalties in a protest vote against tariffs, high gas prices, the Iran War, etc. If the polls were right — and despite the hopium huffed pre-election by the party faithful, they apparently were — the answer may have been there all along: Maybe losing Republican candidates could have driven out more of their fellow partisans if they’d leaned more strongly into their winningest issue, immigration.
The Vice President’s Take
In a tweet he issued the day after the election, Vice President J.D. Vance opined:
One of the things the data analysts on our side obsessed over was "composition"—whether the electorate looked close enough to 2024 for Republicans to win. And despite polls that showed a Democrat blowout, the data kept on telling us the same story: in some states turnout was merely OK, in other states it was downright amazing, and in no state was it catastrophic. There was a genuine sense of optimism on our team: our people were showing up. So, I asked the smartest data guy I know, does that mean we're going to shock the world? "No," he told me. "We might do better than the polls suggest. But the data is telling us that a lot of Trump/Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us." Well, that looks prophetic now. Our voters did show up. In Florida, for example, the electorate was 9 points more Republican than Democrat, just a couple points worse than 2024. Undoubtedly there were places we could have done better on turnout. But the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026. There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is. One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough down the stretch. I’m sure that’s true. But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone. Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were: 1) End the war 2) Focus on cost of living/inflation 3) Put America First 4) Change our relationship to Israel Our voters showed up. And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. This is according to a pollster who nailed the results. While many spent Monday attacking Rachel Campos Duffy for calling for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, it turns out her political advice was sound. (She’s also a great person.) In the next few months, there's going to be a lot of gaslighting. Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty. I'm open to the idea that we should change enforcement—by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you. The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night. If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest. But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there. I remain hopeful about our country. To the people who are pissed off and want to say, “I told you so”: you’re right, you did tell us so. Take that energy into electing Republicans who share your worldview. To the people who are just pissed at the results, you should be. Let’s take that anger and get back to the work of saving our country.
— JD Vance (@JDVance) November 4, 2026
Focus just on the following 19 words in that op-ed sized tweet: “The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.”
There’s likely a lot of truth there. Vance has access to internal polling I know little about and therefore has a much tighter bead on what the voters did or didn’t do than me.
“More Republican Voters in North Carolina Stayed Home”
That said, as is my wont and habit every two years, I spent election day at the polls talking to voters, this year in a suburban-blending-into-rural precinct in western North Carolina, a state where the GOP took it hardest on the chin.
Not to generalize, but regardless of whether you call them Trump loyalists, “MAGA”, or simply the party faithful, they are not hard to spot. The early (and late) voters with the pickup full of tools, mid-day folks wearing company branded polos and other work attire, and of course, people decked out in patriotic garb.
And they are not shy about sharing their opinions, whether it’s about politics, football, or UNC coach Bill Belichick’s erstwhile girlfriend. Not a single one of them even suggested casting a protest vote.
Democratic voters, on the other hand, made it clear who they were supporting, and why. I could go down the list of reasons why they didn’t like Trump — and consequently any Republican candidate — but many of them are not appropriate to repeat here.
Which brings me to a November 4 report aired on Greensboro (N.C.) CBS outlet WFMY News, “More Republican voters in North Carolina stayed home during 2026 midterm election”.
Greensboro is on the other side of the Tar Heel State from where I was, but analyst Ben Brisco explained that, on a statewide basis, fewer voters cast ballots there in 2026 than had in the 2024 presidential election.
More precisely, while 54 percent of North Carolina voters went to the polls on November 3, turnout was down from almost 5.75 million two years ago, to just 4.203 million this go-round.
But while Democrats voted at roughly the same rate there as they had two years prior (2.468 million votes in 2026 compared to 2.57 million in 2024), more than a million fewer Republicans voted this year (1.643 million) compared to 2024 (2.666 million).
That analysis didn’t examine who voters cast ballots for; it looked at the party affiliation of the people who did cast ballots on November 3.
“The question is,” Brisco asked, “why did these voters stay home?” Why, indeed.
The Late October NBC News Poll
Between October 28 and October 30, NBC News polled 1,000 registered voters nationwide, in an effort to take the electorate’s pulse in the then-upcoming contest. The term “immigration” appeared three times therein.
First, question nine in that poll asked respondents: “If you could send one message with your vote this year so the people who win the election know what you mean with your vote, in a SHORT phrase, what would that message be?”
The eleventh most popular response to that question, the choice of 5 percent of respondents, was simply “Border/Immigration Control”, between “Anti-Republican/MAGA” (6 percent) and “Listen to your constituents” (also 5 percent).
Question 12 asked: “Which ONE of these [10] issues is the MOST important issue facing the country? (And, what is the second most important issue facing the country?”
“Immigration and border security” came in fourth, between “Threats to democracy” (and I met plenty of those voters) and “Jobs and the economy” (ditto).
Ten percent of those surveyed chose immigration and the border as their primary issue, and 21 percent placed it either first or second.
Question 17, however, was the kicker: “When it comes to dealing with immigration, which party do you think would do a better job — the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, or both about the same? If you think that neither would do a good job, please just (say so / indicate that).”
Republican handling was favored on that issue by a large (11-point) margin, with nearly half (48 percent) of those polled choosing the GOP compared to the 34 percent of respondents who preferred Democrats in charge of immigration.
Keep that one in mind as I tell you what happened next.
The NBC News Exit Poll
On November 4, NBC News published the result of an exit poll it had conducted “with a group of other news organizations”, and although the word “immigration” appears eight times in that survey, two bear particular notice.
The first reads as follows: “Which ONE of these six issues [crime, the economy, foreign policy, healthcare, immigration, and “the state of democracy’] is the most important facing the country?”
Comparatively, actual Democrat voters were much more concerned than Republican ones on the state of democracy; of the 33 percent of respondents who chose it, 79 percent were in the Party of Jackson.
Conversely, actual Republican voters were much more concerned than Democrats over immigration. Of the 14 percent of those polled who named it as the issue they believed was the “most important” to the country and its future, an overwhelming 89 percent were GOP voters.
The second key question was this: “Regardless of who you support, which party would you say is better able to handle immigration?”
That is essentially the same question 17 that NBC News had asked of registered voters as a whole just days before, but the responses given by voters who had actually cast ballots in the midterm election was very different.
This time around, Republicans had just a two-point edge over their political rivals, with 43 percent favoring GOP handling of immigration and 41 percent preferring Democrats to do that job.
I follow immigration on the daily (and often hourly) and can assure you little to nothing happened from the waning days of October to election day less than a week later that would have prompted the average to sour (or sour more) on how Republicans handled the issue of immigration.
The most obvious conclusion to draw from the very disparate responses to an almost identical question asked by the same outlet is that among the million-plus GOP voters who didn’t show up on November 3 in North Carolina and tens of millions of others nationwide were a large number of voters otherwise really concerned about immigration — and not just immigration: immigration enforcement.
The Ad Spends
In August, the Wesleyan Media Project offered an analysis, “In House, Dems Focus More On Cost of Living; GOP Discuss Crime and Taxes”.
Ignore the headline and read the first sentence: “Ads supporting Republicans and Democrats running for Senate this year have converged on the top issues: immigration and policing.”
It reports that “29 percent ... of ad airings sponsored by Democratic candidates, Democratic-affiliated groups or the Democratic party in Senate races” mentioned immigration, while “38 percent of airings” for Republican Senate candidates referenced the topic, plainly offering very different takes.
August is a lifetime ago in politics, but in early October, the Washington Post examined more than 8,000 political ads and concluded that of the nearly $1 billion Republicans had spent up to that point, $132 million went to ads mentioning immigration.
That is real money (I could easily live on the interest), but it’s less than the $149 million the GOP and its candidates spent on “social issues” like abortion and gender or the $187 million they dropped into ads on “government ethics reform”.
By the way, that Post analysis concluded that just $17 million of the $661 million that Democrats had spent to that point focused on immigration, suggesting they knew it was not a winner for them. Plainly between August and October, one of the parties moved on from immigration, and likely both.
The Post quoted Alex Conant, a Republican strategist, who opined that: “Midterm elections are largely about base turnout, and few issues turn out Republicans better than the immigration issue.” If that’s true, maybe shifting a few of those social-issue and ethics dollars would have helped.
“Why Did These Voters Stay Home”, and Reason to Think They Won’t Next Time
People don’t vote for a myriad of reasons, from lack of interest to a kid’s soccer game. But perhaps more emphasis by GOP candidates on immigration enforcement would have driven some of the million-plus missing Republican North Carolinians to the polls, and tens of millions of others like them nationwide.
Here’s one hopeful note for discouraged Republicans: Maybe GOP voters concerned about immigration took it easy because Trump’s in the White House, and not much will change. He’s not returning in 2029, however, which will give the Grand Old Party an opportunity to remind voters what the other side did to the border when one of theirs was in the Oval Office, and what they could do again.