President Donald Trump's mass deportation program is testing the limits of his constitutional authority and breaking up his MAGA coalition.
Naturalized immigrant voters played a key role in Trump's return to the White House, picking up on gains he made in his losing 2020 race, with surveys showing he picked up 46 percent of their two-party vote. But his crackdown on undocumented immigrants, foreign students, and legal residents could erase those gains, wrote a pair of data analysts in a Washington Post op-ed.
"Voters so far appear to be souring on his handling of immigration in response — and there is reason to believe it might pose a unique threat to his party’s current coalition," Lakshya Jain and Max McCall are partners at Split Ticket, an election data analysis firm.
"Survey estimates are often prone to wide error bands, but actual election results substantiate the theory that Trump made extremely significant gains with these voters," they added. "Immigrant-heavy areas in New Jersey and New York, two states with the largest swings toward Trump in 2024, rocketed further to the right than areas with fewer immigrants did."
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Republicans in general made similar gains in immigrant-heavy areas, which called into question long-held conventional wisdom about GOP immigration policies and immigrant voters.
"When Trump won in 2016 on an even more aggressively restrictionist and antagonistic campaign, his victory was mostly a result of his gains with blue-collar White voters in swing states, not immigrants," Jain and McCall wrote.
"Given Trump’s regular calls for mass deportations in 2024, the most recent realignment might seem counterintuitive," they added. "Many still assume that naturalized voters and their children are a steadfast bulwark for the Democratic Party, a notion that has leached its way into the darker undertones of public discourse, with Elon Musk recently calling Democratic immigration policies 'voter importation scams,' implying that new immigrants could permanently tilt the map against Republicans."
However, the data shows immigrants who became citizens abandoned the Democratic Party at an even higher rate than natural-born citizens.
"Why? YouGov’s pre-election polling data, shared with the Post, found that immigrants rated the economy as their top issue in 2024, and that immigrant non-White voters were significantly more likely than native-born non-White voters to view crime as a determining factor in their vote," the analysts wrote. "On both of these topics, Republicans held issue-specific edges with the overall electorate in 2024. Additionally, moderate and liberal immigrants were much less likely to view abortion as particularly important to their vote, which helped neutralize one of Democrats’ strongest issues."
Polling now shows that Trump's approval on immigration is rapidly declining, with a 50-45 disapproval rating, and vast majorities want him to return the mistakenly deported Kilmar Abrego García from El Salvador and oppose the deportation of students who criticized U.S. foreign policy.
"If immigrant voters turn on Trump, it could rapidly unravel a key new addition to the Republican coalition," Jain and McCall wrote. "But there are few surveys with large sample sizes of naturalized immigrants or that regularly single them out for polling, and a combination of challenges posed by language, nonresponse and data reliability make it harder (and more expensive) for pollsters to track their attitudes."
"If there’s a major shift, it might take some time to detect it," they added, "and the results of the 2025 gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey to help confirm it."
