Polls are coming fast and furious now, with just over three weeks remaining before the November election. The Wall Street Journal released a set on Friday morning, evaluating how voters in swing states viewed the candidacies of Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump. As with most other such polls, views were divided.
The Journal poll also offered up a series of issues for which respondents were asked to pick the better candidates. The responses comported with what we’ve seen elsewhere: Harris has an advantage on health care; Trump on the economy. The biggest gap between the candidates was on immigration, where Trump had a 16-point edge.
That Trump is advantaged on immigration is also not new. He has enjoyed similar advantages consistently since the campaign began, one reason that he focuses so relentlessly on the issue in speeches and interviews. It’s worth noting, though, that other polling released this week suggests that Americans actually prefer the immigration proposals Harris has put forward.
Yahoo News on Wednesday published the results of a poll conducted by YouGov. In addition to asking respondents to evaluate policy proposals, it presented each candidate’s central argument on immigration in the form of quotes — unattributed quotes — from campaign speeches. Two-thirds of Americans agree with Harris’s framing of the issue as multipronged; just under half agreed with Trump’s more apocalyptic and hyperbolic articulation.
Even among Republicans, a majority agreed with Harris’s way of articulating the appropriate response.
YouGov also presented eight policy proposals that had been embraced by the candidates. Four came from the bipartisan border legislation that Harris has endorsed and that (as she frequently notes) Trump was instrumental in killing. Three come from Trump’s campaign rhetoric. The last suggested that undocumented immigrants be given a pathway to citizenship, something that earns a subtle reference on Harris’s campaign website.
The four proposals from the immigration bill endorsed by Harris were the four most-popular proposals overall, although “making it easier to expel immigrants” was about as popular as several other proposals. Three of the four least-popular proposals were Trump’s, including his pledge to round up, detain and deport millions of immigrants (though that was one of the ideas that was viewed about the same as “making it easier”).
So on ideology (as indicated by the question about campaign rhetoric) and on policy (as indicated on the chart above), Harris seems to have an advantage. But on the broader question of “immigration,” she continues to trail Trump.
One reason is that Harris is given more blame for the situation at the border than is Trump. Harris is vice president, meaning her power is necessarily more limited than that of President Joe Biden. It’s likely that her assumption of an immigration-related role within the administration — a move hyped by Trump (again hyperbolically) to suggest that she was centrally responsible for the border — drives a lot of this perception.
That Trump was president and didn’t build the wall the first time around, despite his promises, doesn’t spur nearly as much blame from Americans.
Part of what’s at play, clearly, is that a lot of voters simply view Trump as “tough on the border” and Harris as “not.” Fully three-quarters of respondents in the Yahoo-YouGov poll say that the border is a major problem or a crisis, and major problems and crises are not the sorts of things for which people appreciate nuanced responses.
It’s also probably the case that respondents simply don’t associate the proposals included in the bipartisan legislation with Harris, while they may associate her with proposals such as pathways to citizenship. On the flip side, of course, there is an ongoing under-appreciation of the destabilizing, arbitrary effects of a policy of mass deportation — advantaging Trump.
The border is seen as a crisis and Trump projects a blunt image of toughness, a vibe that effectively neutralizes Harris’s advantage on policy. The Yahoo-YouGov poll also asked respondents who they thought would do a better job handling immigration. These are the same people who preferred Harris’s broad approach and her specific endorsed policies, mind you.
Trump was preferred on immigration by 15 points.