Trump's attacks on immigrants are hurting him with swing-state voters

Voters in key swing states are fed up with Trump’s racist anti-immigrant policies, according to polling released Monday by Priorities USA. Half of the voters in Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin say Trump’s stance on immigration issues is a reason to vote for someone else in 2020, while only 41% say it is a reason to support Trump.

The numbers among undecided voters are just as bad, or worse, for Trump. Barely one-third (34%) of undecided voters cite immigration as a reason to support Trump, while almost half (46%) say Trump’s handling of the issue is a reason to support someone else who will bring a different approach.

“Immigration may be important to keeping Trump’s base together, but it hurts him with the broader electorate,” Priorities said in a memo about the polling.

While Trump speaks regularly about immigration, his handling of the issue has been an unmitigated disaster. His anti-immigrant animus was evident from day one, when Trump attacked Mexicans as “rapists” at his campaign kickoff event in 2015. Since coming to the White House, Trump has relentlessly attacked immigrants both through rhetoric and policy.

Trump famously derided immigrants from Haiti and all of Africa as being from “shithole countries.” In the lead-up to the 2018 midterms, Trump abandoned messages about the economy to increasingly focus on racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric in hopes of driving out the Republican base.

His hateful words are backed up by policy. Most odious and shocking among them was the family separation policy championed by Trump in the summer of 2018. Trump oversaw thousands and thousands of immigrant children torn away from their parents in a transparent attempt to discourage other immigrants, including asylum-seekers, from coming to the United States.

In early 2019, Trump declared a fake national emergency at the southern border so he could steal money from the military to build an unnecessary vanity wall.

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” reads the plaque upon the Statue of Liberty. But when those fleeing violence and yearning to breathe free, Trump does all in his power to make their lives more difficult.

“This is an administration obsessed with attacking immigrants,” Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA) told Shareblue Media in April.

Voters seem to agree, and polls show they want a different path forward for a nation that has always claimed to welcome immigrants to our shores.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.