mattkime wrote:
Its going to take another week or two to factor in the immigration stuff. Those numbers are a week old.

....not that I expect them to change.

Speedy wrote: After he signed the EO ending his policy, I expect his numbers to drop. The Deplorables are not going to be pleased.

A different group of researchers polled white Americans on how their view of diversity affected their likelihood of voting for Trump. They found that when whites were reminded that America was becoming an increasingly black and brown country, they were more likely to support Trump and favor restrictions on immigration.

“Reminding White Americans high in ethnic identification that non-White racial groups will outnumber Whites in the United States by 2042 caused them ... to report increased support for Trump and anti-immigrant policies,” the researchers conclude.

This is the devilish problem of the Trump era in a nutshell. The most grotesque-seeming parts of Trump’s presidency — his crackdown on undocumented migrants, the Muslim ban, his shocking moral equivalencies during the white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia — tap into the forces that are most responsible for making him president. The stories of separated families in the media rend the hearts of neutral observers, but Trump’s most hardcore supporters may very well have the opposite reaction.

This intersects in a particularly dangerous way with partisanship. If Trump can maintain support from his hardcore base, enough to hold majority support in the GOP, he won’t actually have to cave immediately — and the longer and more loudly he fights for a policy, the more support for it will become part of GOP orthodoxy.

It’s simply a fact that Trump’s racial politics are popular with millions of white Americans; even a policy as vicious as the family separations attracted significant amounts of support. It’s also a demonstrable fact that the strength of GOP partisanship means that, in theory, Republican presidents should be able to attract the support of the party base and, as a result, its political establishment. Those two facts mean that Trump will pretty much always be able to get them to back his attacks on members of minority groups, given time and effort.

Let’s be clear: Ending family separation (for now) is a good thing, and it’s understandable that some liberals may be tempted to count this as a win. But that the separations happened at all, and that millions of Americans were perfectly fine with them, is something that should trouble us all.