President Donald Trump’s poll numbers on immigration are not as good as they seem, and his decisions on the key campaign issue “could be coming back to haunt him," MSNBC opinion writer and editor Hayes Brown warned.
“It’s true that in poll after poll, including the latest NBC News poll, released Sunday, immigration has been Trump’s ‘strongest issue.’” Brown said before adding, “But it’s a mistake to conflate that measurement of relative strength with his being strong on the issue overall.”
Brown’s interpretation of the poll is: Americans don’t like Trump’s “deportation campaign.” He believes Democrats ought to take notice.
Citing a February Pew Research Center poll, 59% of Americans strongly approved or somewhat approved of “increasing efforts to deport people living in the U.S. illegally.”
However, Brown noted this sentiment rapidly changed when the administration put "its more aggressive tactics into play.”
A more recent CBS poll found that “only 44% support Trump’s approach” to deportation. While this is one of Trump’s stronger polling numbers, it's certainly not a popular idea, which is why Brown believes Democrats should exploit it.
Similarly, Brown quoted a June 9 Quinnipiac University poll that found just 43% of respondents approved of Trump’s handling of immigration issues, while 54% disapproved — a majority of Americans.
“It’s time, then, to abandon the fiction that Trump is too strong on immigration to take on directly,” Brown said.
“Trump’s polling numbers on immigration did rise back up again as the focus moved away from the issue, only to dip again now that the spotlight has been placed back on it,” Brown said.
He believes Democrats need to harness this idea: “It would be a mistake for Democrats to let that focus dim again,” Brown later added, “at a time when even Trump himself has apparently begun to realize that his mass deportations overreach could be coming back to haunt him.”