How Much Ground Has Trump Lost on Immigration in the Polls? |
There’s not much question that the brutal immigration-enforcement tactics on display in Minneapolis and elsewhere have roiled U.S. politics. The resulting furor produced a partial government shutdown, and Trump himself seems wrong-footed by the world-wide backlash to scenes of masked thugs attacking immigrants, protesters, and bystanders alike.
But it’s a little more difficult to measure how much this has affected Donald Trump’s own public standing. Renee Good was killed by an ICE agent on January 7. Alex Pretti was killed by Border Control agents on January 24. Using the polling averages at Silver Bulletin, we see that Trump’s overall net job-approval rating stood at minus-12.2 percent on January 6 and dropped to minus-14.6 percent by the end of the month (it’s at minus-13.4 percent on February 4). As usual, the mix of pollsters releasing data in this period puts various thumbs on scales. Readings on Trump’s net job-approval range from Insider Advantage, whose February 1 survey pegged it at 1 percent, to Pew Research, which placed it at minus-24 percent as of January 26.
Looking at post-shootings job-approval........