Trump Is Suddenly Bleeding Independents. A Brutal New Poll Shows Why.

Donald Trump campaigned for the presidency this time around on the most openly ethno-nationalist platform in memory, one he explicitly promised to implement with undisguised authoritarian measures. After he took office, and the forced disappearances and renditions to foreign gulags got going, there was reason to fear that he’d successfully acclimated voters to such tactics, and that he’d ride a wave of approval on the then-thriving economy to seal public approval of them for good. 

This deeply unsettling scenario appears not to be happening. And it’s not just because Trump quickly crashed the good economy he inherited. A genuine backlash to Trump’s ethno-nationalist authoritarianism may be starting to take shape on its own terms.

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll, released Friday, is only the most recent of many surveys to find Trump slipping underwater on immigration, which has been his best issue. The poll finds that a majority of Americans, 53 percent, disapprove of his handling of the issue, while only 46 percent approve.

But the Post poll is also notable for another crushing finding for Trump: He is badly underwater on immigration among independents. Importantly, this is true both on attitudes toward Trump’s handling of immigration generally and on the specifics. Here are the poll’s key findings in this regard:

• Fifty-six percent of independents disapprove of Trump’s handling of immigration, while only 42 percent approve.
• Sixty-two percent of independents oppose deporting international students who have criticized U.S. policy in the Mideast, while only 36 percent percent support it.
• Fifty-two percent of independents oppose sending undocumented immigrants who are suspected members of a criminal group to a prison in El Salvador without a hearing, while only 46 percent support it.
• Only 21 percent of independents want wrongfully deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia to remain imprisoned in El Salvador, while 39 percent say he should be returned to the United States. Here, many are undecided, but that abysmal 21 percent figure suggests Trump’s propaganda depicting him as a gang member who doesn’t deserve due process is a bust.

Trump is bleeding independent support in general. As CNN analyst Harry Enten recently detailed, aggregated polling shows that Trump is underwater with this demographic by 22 points, the worst ever in presidential polling.

Trump’s hemorrhaging among independents surely has a lot to do with the economy. But it’s likely immigration is playing a role here, as well, because independents are turning on Trump on this issue too.

While some polls have found generalized approval of Trump on immigration, lots of data shows broad disapproval on many of the lawless specifics. This week’s Reuters/Ipsos poll also found his generalized approval underwater, just as the new Post poll does, suggesting he’s sinking on the issue very broadly. G. Elliott Morris even finds this general approval sinking in tandem with attention to the Abrego Garcia case.

The details here are instructive. Recent polls have found that 60 percent of independents support the Supreme Court ruling that Trump should facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return and that 51 percent of independents disapprove of the government’s sending of migrants to a Venezuelan prison without hearings, while only 27 percent approve. All that supports the Post poll’s findings.

Note that these are all matters that raise basic issues of fundamental fairness, due process, and the rule of law. This is likely a key reason independents are tilting against Trump on them. They appear to involve arbitrary, flagrant, and lawless abuses of power that flout the basic principle that all people deserve due process and a fair hearing, regardless of their status—the very principle, of course, that the Trump project is hell-bent on demolishing.

To be clear, I’m not arguing that immigration is the reason Trump is bleeding independents. What’s probably going on is more subtle than that. Trump’s lawlessness across the board is clearly a problem among this demographic: That Reuters-Ipsos poll, for instance, found that very large majorities of unaffiliated voters want Trump to follow court orders and oppose his efforts to cut off funds to universities that he disagrees with, which is also probably illegal.

The renditions to foreign dungeons, the snatching of international students from crowded streets, the frog-marching of migrants onto military planes as ritual, sadistic humiliation, the totalitarian-style propaganda baselessly smearing people like Abrego Garcia as criminals—it all smacks of just that kind of lawlessness. 

It’s likely that all this is reinforcing for many independents the sense that Trump is engaged in rampant extralegal abuses of power. This may be helping drive their disapproval and undermining (baseless) impressions of him as a no-nonsense executive determined to tackle prices and government inefficiencies.

All this also explains why Democrats shouldn’t fear engaging on these matters. Those jarring images of unchecked lawlessness, which are generating relentless media coverage in exactly those terms, have the capacity to create a sense of crisis.  

As Brian Beutler and Will Stancil explain well, rather than fear the “immigration” issue as this fixed thing that voters are brainlocked into seeing as an immutable Trump strength, Democrats should understand this moment differently. Such powerful, attention-grabbing imagery can inspire the sense that something is profoundly amiss—that bedrock societal principles are in deep peril—which can cut through the fractured media environment and jog people out of their information silos.

Something very big is at stake here, as you’ll immediately grasp if you watch this video of top Trump adviser Stephen Miller:

This is the shrill, unhinged, drunk-on-power voice of someone who has absolute faith in the power of propaganda to seduce people into giving up on a basic rule-of-law tenet—that all people merit fair hearings before the government metes out their fates, regardless of status—by smearing entire classes of people as criminals, terrorists, and armies of invaders. It’s the language of fascism.

Miller and his fellow propagandists are very consciously trying to see how far they can get with this project. That the middle of the country appears to be seeing through the haze of agitprop—and grasping that what’s at stake here are matters of fundamental fairness and due process for all people on U.S. soil—provides grounds for cautious optimism at a time when such moments are unnervingly rare.