What To Make Of The Protest Votes In Michigan
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I think three things. Only ever three. You only think three? I'm sure you've got a lot more thoughts in that head. Four. Four whole. Four whole. All right. All right. Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast. I'm Galen Druk, and we've got a lot to cover today. First and foremost, this is our Michigan primary reaction podcast. On Tuesday night, both Trump and Biden easily won their respective primaries in the state. But

We're going to take a look under the hood and make sense of some of the discontent in both parties. The uncommitted vote on the Democratic side received about 13 percent support. That vote was largely organized by activists who disapprove of Biden's handling of the Israel-Hamas war. And on the Republican side, Haley once again overperformed her polls and got about 27 percent of the vote.

We're also going to turn our gaze to Washington, where we are just days away from a partial government shutdown. And that's just the first in a series of deadlines that Congress has to meet to keep the government funded and running. Also, both Biden and Trump are heading to the southern border on Thursday to talk about immigration.

Perhaps they've been looking at the polls. A new Gallup poll came out this week showing that immigration has supplanted the economy as the most important problem facing the country. So we're going to talk about it. And later in the show, we have a good or bad use of polling example that uses pictures, specifically a picture of RFK Jr. and his father.

Could voters tell the difference? Here with me to discuss is Director of Data Analytics, Elliot Morris. Welcome to the podcast, Elliot. Hey, Galen. Also joining us is Senior Washington Correspondent at Politico and co-author of Playbook, Rachel Bade. Welcome back to the podcast, Rachel. Hey there. And joining us for the first time is Michigan politics reporter for the independent nonpartisan outlet Bridge Michigan, Jonathan Osting. Welcome to the podcast. Hi.

Hey, thanks for having me. It's so exciting to have a local reporter. So I want to start with you and I want to talk about the Democratic side. A lot of the reporting leading up to Tuesday's primary focused on Michigan's Arab American population and

Arab Americans make up about 2% of the state population, which is small but still the highest percentage in the country. Between that and the campaign to vote uncommitted, the race was framed as a referendum on Biden's handling of the war in Gaza.

As somebody who's on the ground in Michigan, I'm curious what you make of that framing. Well, it was certainly curious to see all of the national media descend on Dearborn in particular to tell that exact same story. But yeah, I mean, it was, you know, otherwise going to be a pretty boring primary. And I think, you know, people were looking for a little drama and that provided it. I mean, do you think...

that it was an appropriate framing? And if that was the framing, what did we learn? Well, yeah, listen, it's an issue for Biden. The campaign ended up getting 13% of the vote for uncommitted in Michigan, which, as you mentioned, is not a huge number. But by raw numbers, about 100,000 Michigan voters cast uncommitted ballots. And that's significant because,

Donald Trump won the state in 2016 by 10,704 votes. Biden won the state in 2020 by about 154,000 votes. So 100,000, you know, that could be significant if it holds in the general election. That said, 13% is a pretty –

You know, it's not hugely consequential. And based on historic standards in Michigan, the uncommitted vote is actually fairly popular here. In 2012, for instance, Obama was running uncontested. Eleven percent of Democratic primary voters cast uncommitted ballots that year. So, you know, this year, this campaign specifically focused on the Gaza war boosted those numbers a bit, but, you know, not in a way that –

necessarily spells doom for Biden come fall. Okay, I want to dig into that question a little bit more about whether it spells doom for Biden in the fall. But first, Elliot, what do you make of that 13% number? I know you were trying to create benchmarks before the primary voting happened for like, what would signify significant discontent in Michigan? Yeah, well, I guess three things. I think three things.

Only ever three. You only think three? I'm sure you've got a lot more thoughts than I had. Four. Four holes. Okay, all right. First off, it's hard to make benchmarks, okay? Michigan's primary system has changed since the last time there was competitive primaries there and since the last time there was a high or comparable uncontested vote. That was in 2012.

when Barack Obama faced a sort of 11 to 12% uncontested vote in his primary. But it's a caucus, right? So uncontested means something somewhat different. You know, it is a high number, 100,000 voters, Democrats, presumably, deciding to...

check uncontested on a box and register their discontent with the president. That is real hard proof of something we've only ever observed in polls or media accounts elsewhere. So it's good to have those raw numbers. I'm just not sure it tells us anything new, anything different about the way this campaign's unfolding.

We know that... Like, we already knew that Biden was struggling with, say, young voters or voters of color. Right. We already know he's struggling with young voters, with liberals, especially with Arab-American Democrats over the situation in Israel and Gaza. So this confirms that, but it's not like a break glass moment, I think, for Joe Biden. It is confirmatory of a weakness. Finally, third, in a close election, that could matter. But you know what could also matter is...

uh attrition on the republican side uh or any other number of events that shape the this campaign so uh look if if joe biden ultimately loses the election it's going to be impossible for us to say that like this one event re-elected donald trump because there are a million other factors that made the election close and this one just tipped it so i think people are reading a

Okay. Yeah. I think it's also a little tricky to say there's discontent with Biden on this issue. So therefore X or Y, right? Like for example, if Biden moves to the left and he, I think he has moved to the left a little bit or taken more consideration of progressives position on this issue, you know, he risks losing folks on the other side of the equation. And we know that Paul,

that part of the way he won in 2020 was overperforming with like suburban college educated voters who had been ancestral Republicans in places like the Atlanta suburbs, the Philadelphia collar counties. The same is true of the collar counties in Detroit, for example. And so this is politics and you move in one direction and you risk sort of being outdone in the other direction. Rachel, I know you've been doing some reporting in Michigan. What do you make of all of this? I think,

There's a bigger story going on beyond just looking at that 13% uncommitted. When I was out in Michigan, and I talked to folks on the phone on this too, I spoke to a number of people in the abandoned Biden movement, which is beyond the uncommitted movement. These are Arab Americans and Muslim voters who have already decided that they will not vote for Biden. They didn't show up and vote uncommitted. They showed up and voted for someone else.

So one thing I've been looking at or I'm interested in actually learning more about is the group of voters who voted in the Democratic primary but did not vote for Biden. It looks like that was six percent. If you combine that six percent with like the uncommitted, I mean, isn't that more of a problem for Biden? Because there is a group of voters out there who voted.

will not vote for Biden, even if it means electing Donald Trump. And I think one of the problems that the Biden campaign has right now is they keep thinking that voters are going to view this as a binary choice when we get closer to November. You're either with Donald Trump or you're with Joe Biden. And I don't think they understand yet that there are a lot of voters out there who said to me,

I don't like Trump. I didn't like the Muslim ban. And I thought, you know, he was like xenophobic. But Donald Trump didn't kill our people. Joe Biden killed our people and literally have said that to me. Whether you agree with it or not, there are a group of people who are not going to vote for him and who are beyond the uncommitted. So now, is it enough to upend things in November for him in Michigan? I don't know. It sounds like you guys think not necessarily. Yeah.

Yeah, to your point, you know, Biden is struggling with Arab Americans, not just because of this issue. I mean, Dearborn actually was like a real hotspot for the book wars in 2022. You know, traditionally conservatively, culturally conservative. A lot of Arab Americans came out in support of book bans in local libraries. And really, Michigan Republicans flocked to their side. And there were some interesting alliances that were formed there.

during that movement a couple years ago. In fact, two co-chairs in the Michigan Republican Party right now are Arab American folks from the Dearborn area. In Dearborn in particular, which really got all this attention because of the uncommitted vote, Trump got almost as many votes as Biden too. I mean, it was about a thousand difference. So Trump actually, Republicans in general, I think were making some inroads in those communities to begin with. I mean, Arab Americans were

more likely to be conservative before 9-11. I mean, that all changed and they've been reliably democratic for the past two decades. But there were some signs that was already beginning to shift. Yeah, I think there are some good points here. You know, folks who've been listening to the podcast for a while might remember an interview we did with a Turkish immigrant named

back in the fall, who basically said he had voted for Biden, but that the LGBTQ agenda in schools was making him reconsider his vote. This was before anything that happened on October 7th.

But I also want to say, to Rachel's point, the uncommitted vote, like somebody who is engaged in politics enough to turn out in a Democratic primary to send a message to the Democratic incumbent, are people who you might expect to actually vote for a Democrat in the fall or at least view Donald Trump as enough of a threat that they might consider, like, still just voting for Biden. Yeah.

It's people who are not engaged in this process right now that are maybe more of a threat. And when it comes to that, I think in some ways this focus on Arab Americans is, while important, a little misguided, right? So Arab Americans make up 200,000 of...

Michigan's 10 million population of those people who are old enough to vote, who are actually registered. It's a relatively low turnout population anyway. So if we're talking about like raw numbers, the Arab American vote, even though it's the strongest in Michigan of any place in the country, is still not particularly strong. The bigger issue I would suggest is amongst Americans.

young voters and voters of color broadly. We already know that Biden deteriorated significantly in his support amongst Latino voters. We've seen it decline precipitously amongst Black voters from about 90% favorability when he took office to about 60% favorability now. And so I think the bigger question is,

Is he able to shore up his coalition in other places also represented in Michigan, like Detroit, which has a large African-American population, for example? Is he going to be able to turn folks out? And I think while it's not like a distraction, it's a somewhat crude way of doing electoral math to keep talking about this segment of the population and also distrust.

To be clear, this is not a population that is voting 100 percent for Democrats anyway. Like you could easily go and say, well, what's the Jewish population in Pennsylvania? And therefore, you know, Biden needs to be strong on Israel in order to keep that coalition together, which is significantly larger than two percent in Pennsylvania. But that's actually not how politics works. I think this whole thing has gotten us a little bit astray. But I'm curious, Jonathan, you're the Michigander on the podcast. Would you agree with that?

Yeah. In fact, I actually spent some time on college campuses a couple of weeks ago, specifically exploring that idea of young voters. And I mean, it was a very small sample size, of course, just kids I ran into on campus. But I didn't really find anybody super enthusiastic about Joe Biden. And in fact, several were, you know, exploring third party options. One went to a RFK junior rally. And, you know, there's been some polling in Michigan. Again, it's a

You guys probably wouldn't like it because it's a small sample from a 600-sample poll. It's pretty good. 600? 600? Well, 600 statewide and then breaking down the young voter demographic within that. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We caution against crosstabs. Sure, crosstabs.

But in any case, you know, there are pollsters here in Michigan who are raising alarm bells specifically about the young voter issue. And, you know, Biden won Michigan in part because of this coalition, which included young people, Detroit. But also he did really well in some suburbs that had traditionally been GOP strongholds. And I will note one other takeaway from the Michigan primary last night was that Trump

underperformed in areas like Oakland County, Kent County, and even Ottawa County, which used to be just a diehard GOP stronghold. Nikki Haley topped 30% in each of those counties, not a huge number, but she did better there than in other parts of the state, suggesting Trump might still have some issues with his suburban voters, giving Biden some positive takeaways from this election perhaps.

If I can just jump in here and without getting too much into the validity of early polling or crosstabs for favorability among different demographic groups. No, dive right in. Just really go for it. It's a little beside the point right now. I find this conversation about Biden's weakness also a little shoehorned. You know what number is bigger than the percent of

is both bigger in raw numbers and percentage terms than support for undecided or third-party candidates, or sorry, non-Biden or uncommitted candidates in the Democratic Party. It's the share and number of votes Nikki Haley got last night. And so if we're doing all this math about

We were about to pivot, Elliot. Okay. You have to come in here. Jump in the gap. To an extent, it's a binary choice. But okay, I will let us get there when you're ready. I guess you have four choices, as we like to say. If you don't like Biden or Trump, you can not vote. You can vote third party. You can hold your nose and vote for Trump. You can hold your nose and vote for Biden. That's how I like to present the choices that folks make this fall. But...

I hear your point. Let's talk about the Republican primary. And I think the first question I want to ask is, so Nikki Haley was approaching 30 percent statewide. She beat her polls. So I should say that Donald Trump beat Nikki Haley by about 42 points statewide. Going into Tuesday, Trump was leading in our average of polls by 57 points. So that's an underperformance on Trump's part by 15 points statewide.

I'm curious, Elliot, do you think there's something significant there? Because we have seen a similar trend actually also in New Hampshire and South Carolina of Nikki Haley beating her polls. I do think there is something to, uh,

the pretty uniform pattern of Trump underperforming his polls in the primaries. I would not want to over-interpret that as shy Nikki Haley voters or people lying to pollsters or that. It's equally plausible that pollsters are just getting unrepresentative samples of primary voters. Remember, polls today— Which is to say, like, not enough independents or potential Democrats showing up in a Republican primary? Yeah.

Yeah, there's some methodological challenges here with polling primary voters. Remember, polls have a response rate of like 1% if you're lucky these days. So that means pollsters have to adjust their data to make it representative of whatever population they're trying to sample. That's somewhat easy to do if your population is all Americans because the census gives you the demographic breakdowns, like this percent of the population is white, this percent is old, etc.,

But you don't really have that for the population of primary voters. For one thing, the population appears and disappears on election day. So you have to approximate it with a voter file or a previous poll. But secondly, we don't know...

You know, we don't know how that population has shifted since the last time there was a primary in that state. So, you know, whether or not this is some latent psychological pattern or just methodological, I would lean toward methodological. But it does seem, you know, it does seem like it's happening pretty much every primary to a different degree. We talked about on the Democratic side there being—

about, like, you could call it a 20% protest vote. It's 13% uncommitted, a little more than 13% uncommitted, a little more than 6% voted for Dean Phillips or Marianne Williamson or whoever else they could have voted for, they could have written in whoever they wanted. And on the Republican side, of course, only 3% voted uncommitted

but 27, 28% voted for Nikki Haley. Is it fair to add all that up and say, well, on the Republican side, there's a 30% protest vote, but on the Democratic side, there was only a 20% protest vote because Nikki Haley is more of a live option than, well, uncommitted Dean Phillips or Marianne Williamson.

Look, Joe Biden is heading for the most successful presidential primary for an incumbent president since the modern primary system began. George H.W. Bush got 73% of the vote in 1990 nationwide. Jimmy Carter got 51%. So Joe Biden hanging out at like 80, 90% in these contests is...

significantly better than our benchmarks. Donald Trump, by contrast, is doing poorly. Come on. Come on. First of all, he doesn't have a strong challenger. And second of all, I think making these historical comparisons is a little bit tricky because of the role that partisanship has played in terms of becoming increasingly a motivating factor here. And so while I think we can bring up those numbers, I don't think we're comparing apples to apples necessarily. Yeah.

Yeah, there's no apples to apples outside of the modern polarized system. I buy that point. All I'm saying is if you're trying to come up with an expectation for Joe Biden and you're converting that into how he's going to do in the general election, then it's not at all clear to me that he's

sort of like significantly below where you would want him to be. Maybe he's five points below. But anyway, the second order effect of this is he's doing a heck of a lot better than Donald Trump. The people in Donald Trump's position right now, you know, incumbents, pseudo incumbents running for presidential nomination, whether or not you count him as an incumbent, he's running between

You know, between Jimmy Carter and H.W. Bush, both of whom lost in their general election. Anyway, my point here is you can spin these numbers however you want. Yeah. Let's ask the Michigan reporter. I mean, do you see that 30 percent on the Republican side as a protest vote or are folks saying like, no, we still...

We're voting for Nikki Haley because we still think she has a shot at the nomination. You know, I think it's probably a little bit of both. But certainly, you know, folks know that Donald Trump is likely going to be the nominee. People I talk to, I talk to one voter who was actually uncommitted in the GOP primary yesterday in Grand Rapids, Kent County, one of those

areas that really went for Biden in 2020. She voted for Trump in 2016, Biden in 2020. And this year, she definitely lodged a protest vote. She couldn't stomach voting for any candidate on either side of the ticket and voted uncommitted and said she's got a lot of soul searching to do. So certainly some of that was a protest vote. Rachel, do you have a take on this, at least in terms of how both sides are reacting to this? Like, do you...

Do you see Biden's team or Trump's team as taking the results of the primary so far particularly seriously as indicative of poor performance in the general? I mean, I do think it's interesting that all the coverage is really focusing on Biden and the uncommitted vote. And when it comes to Trump versus Haley, the story always seems to be, oh, Trump dominating Haley, Haley.

she's basically lost her path. There's no path for her as opposed to, oh, this group of voters is voting for Haley. I think there was an AP exit poll in South Carolina that found like one in five Republicans in South Carolina said they will not vote for Donald Trump, even if he is the nominee. Like those sorts of numbers, obviously, the Trump campaign should be particularly worried about. Right. But

It does feel like there's not enough analysis and coverage of this other piece of it and how that's going to factor into things. And in terms of like how both of these campaigns are playing it, that I can tell you. I mean, the Biden campaign, again, they seem to be of this opinion that people are going to come home in November when it's Trump versus Biden.

Biden. I feel like they are wearing some rose colored glasses on that. And I don't know that if what Biden is doing right now is enough to sort of bring some of these voters around. I mean, you've seen a very clear shift in his rhetoric in recent days. First at the UN, where you had the United States drafting a resolution calling for, you know, a temporary ceasefire and actually using the word ceasefire for the first time since, you

You know, this war broke out months ago, and now Biden's saying that even more, that he expects a ceasefire in the coming days, which, by the way, the reality on the ground suggests that that is not the case right now. But Biden is he seems to be hearing that there's a problem and thinking that he can fix it by just saying these words. I just don't know that that's.

That's going to change people's minds. So and the Trump people, Trump is always boasting about his numbers. I haven't caught up with any of his top campaign advisors since last night, but they do generally seem to have a better grasp about his challenges ahead than the actual candidate himself. So we'll see. Yeah.

All right. Well, Jonathan, we're going to give you the last word here as the Michigander. We're talking about some very specific dynamics within the two parties here. But if you had to characterize what is happening politically in Michigan today, how would you do it? And that's coming from the perspective of like in polling recently, it doesn't seem like Biden is doing particularly well there. But at the same time, you have a very popular Democratic governor and a Republican Party candidate.

at least in terms of the actual infrastructure of the Republican Party that is in disarray. I mean, up until recently, it looked like the state was going to have two Republican conventions because the chair who had lost recently was claiming that the vote was illegitimate and was going to hold her own convention. Nonetheless, it seems like a court has put the kibosh on that. But given all of that, tell us, sir, what's your take on where things come down?

Well, I think anecdotally, you know, I see a lot of energy right now on the Republican side, but that energy is largely focused on fighting each other at this point, at least within the state party apparatus. As far as the general electorate goes, I mean, I think this is sort of going to be like 2016 or to a lesser extent 2020. You've got two quite unpopular candidates and a lot of voters here are trying to figure out if they can stomach more

one or the other. And, you know, the fight is going to be about persuading those voters who don't like either candidate to vote for one of them in November. All right. We're going to leave things there. And we're going to let you go, Jonathan. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks. And next, we're going to talk about what's going on in Washington.

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Congress now has until Friday at midnight before they reach a key funding deadline that, if not met, will lead to a partial government shutdown. The bipartisan bill that would prevent this was hoped to be released last Sunday. However, disagreements over policy issues delayed the unveiling. If Congress does not come to an agreement on funding by Friday night, key agencies like the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Transportation Department, and the Veterans Administration will run out of funding.

So Rachel, this is squarely your area of expertise. What is going on right now? Oh my gosh. I feel like this is Groundhog Day. How many times have we had a shutdown fight in the past, like, couple months? It's

It's getting a little old. Look, I think they're going to fund the government. I think that Republican leadership in both chambers believes that a shutdown would actually blow back more on their party than Joe Biden and the White House. So I think they're going to find a way to get there. The problem, of course, is that Speaker Johnson has a lot of Republican members who are pissed at him.

And they think he is caving to Democrats all the time and they want him to stand firm on things. And so they want some sort of real policy wins on these appropriation bills. But getting these policy wins, convincing a Senate Democrats and a Democratic White House to sign on to things like a ban on mail order abortion pills.

I mean, good luck. I just don't see it happening. So my best estimate is that Johnson is going to end up caving. He's going to get in big trouble with his members. But...

They'll avoid a shutdown. Now, one of the things we should keep in mind is any one senator can actually hold up like the fast tracking process. We only have a couple of days, as you mentioned, and Senate procedure is a spider web like it takes forever. It's extremely complicated and difficult.

If one senator objects and tries to draw everything out, we could have a partial shutdown for a little bit until they're able to have the final passage vote in the chamber. So a lot of moving parts here, but I think I do think it'll get resolved.

As Rachel mentioned, this is something of a Groundhog Day situation. You suggested that Republicans think the blowback will affect them more from a potential shutdown than it would affect Democrats. Elliot, what does history say about how government shutdowns shape political perceptions?

Yeah. In terms of the historical polls and some political science research, history suggests there's modest blame placed on the party that seems like the one that's more responsible. And I know what I just said sounds incredibly nebulous, and that's

Because it is. Most voters, to the extent that they will hear about a shutdown, will hear sort of binary anecdotes about senators or House members who are holdouts and then attach blame to that person if they attach blame at all. And that's one method of accountability. And then another is, you know, to take the 2013 example for the debt crisis, when there is an extended period of a government shutdown that causes people to lose their jobs or decreases liquidity in the markets,

then voters do react to that sort of thing, too. In that case, blame was attached more to Republicans. So the takeaway here is like the precise events leading up to the shutdown do matter. And if it looks like, you know, just historically, if one senator or a group of

of members seems like the ones to blame, the voters typically do react to that. There's a conventional wisdom on the Hill that the party who makes the demand in a shutdown is the party that gets blamed and loses. And we've seen this on, as you mentioned, we've seen it on both sides of the aisle. The one that stands out to me is Trump's shutdown over the border wall.

going into the Democratic takeover in 2019, January of 2019, the government shutdown in December of 2018 was the longest government shutdown we had. Trump didn't get a penny of his border wall.

The polls, you know, put showed Republicans were to blame and voters were blaming Republicans. And so they end up caving. But then I believe it was just a few months after that. We saw another government shutdown where the Democrats were demanding a fix for DACA for dreamers. It was after like some sort of court ruling where these dreamers were sort of in limbo who had been brought to this country as kids.

and their legal status. And Schumer and Pelosi tried to make a demand to protect Dreamers, which is very popular polling-wise, but they ended up seeing a lot of public pressure because they were making the demand that they weren't going to fund the government until a solution for Dreamers came up. And they ended up caving in again, getting nothing. So generally speaking, the people who have sort of seen this happen up here is like,

The party that makes a demand gets the blame. And that's why you see a lot of leaders saying this is a bad idea. And gets nothing. That too. Yeah, that too.

This is all happening against the backdrop of Ukraine military aid and border security being, I hesitate to call them live debates on the Hill because it seems like debate over border security has been squashed. But I actually want to talk about that. But let's start. Let's get Ukraine sort of out of the way to begin with, which is.

Does it look like there's any chance that there is more consideration amongst Republicans of passing Ukraine military aid? It looks like at this point than passing the bipartisan border security bill. How like where would you put the odds out for that, Rachel?

Yeah, it's really tough. There are clearly numbers for passage. It's already passed the Senate. If it was put on the House floor, Ukraine would pass with flying colors. 300 plus votes, Democrats, Republicans. Problem again goes back to Speaker Johnson in this faction of conservatives who don't support helping Ukraine anymore.

who have threatened to oust him as speaker if he even allows a vote on this. The White House right now is really trying this pressure campaign when the speaker went to the White House with all the other congressional leaders. The whole room ganged up on him and, you know, tried to make this point that if we don't help Ukraine, Putin wins. This is just the start. He could try to invade another country and it could eventually draw in the United States if he goes after and attacks an eight-hour ally. So we have to help Ukraine. But

Johnson is also thinking about his own political future. So I really don't know. I mean, like I will tell you, Mike Turner, the chairman of the house intelligence committee has sworn to me up and down that Johnson at some point is going to put this on the floor. I don't really believe him because I,

I just haven't seen Johnson suggest that he will do anything. And even in these White House meetings, he was still demanding a border solution first before helping Ukraine. And yet he rejected the bipartisan border solution that the senators after actually came up with. So it feels like this tangled web.

Yeah, I mean, let's talk about that both tomorrow on Thursday. Folks might be listening to this on Thursday. So perhaps today, Biden and Trump are both going to be at the southern border. This is Biden's only second visit to the southern border during his presidency.

And we have a polling peg here as well, which is that 28 percent of Americans, according to Gallup, now say that it's the most important issue facing the country. That's if voters have to choose just one thing to select. Of course, when you look at polling where voters can choose any number of things, it's something more like two thirds of Americans view the border and immigration as an important issue.

And as we've talked about, this is an issue that does not go down well for Democrats. Americans trust Trump and they trust Republicans more on immigration. In fact, a majority of Americans today support building a border wall when Democrats

Trump first came onto the scene in 2015 and was talking a lot about it, there was a big backlash against building a border wall. So you actually see before Trump comes on the scene, Americans are more evenly split on a border wall. As soon as Trump starts talking about it, there's significant backlash against him, and the border wall remains unpopular for much of his presidency.

Now, a clear majority of Americans support a border wall again. And so thermostatic public opinion, I guess, is what we like to call it. But also, to be clear, Americans are reacting to something that's really happening on the

the ground, you know, more than 150,000 apprehensions per month for much of Biden's presidency, which well surpasses the sort of less than 50,000 apprehensions per month that we were mostly seeing during Trump and Obama's administration. And then, of course, most recently, the record breaking 300,000 apprehensions in December.

So what happens next here? You know, I laid out the sort of public opinion. Is there a policy solution or is immigration reform, border security truly just completely dead in Washington? I would be shocked if a bill is able to move out of Congress. I think that Republicans...

Republican leadership, specifically Speaker Mike Johnson and him calling the Senate border deal like basically an open border policy means that he now has sort of boxed himself in to accepting anything that can actually pass the Senate and actually get a Biden signature.

And the things that he wants to see at the border, I mean, they just won't ever pass with Democrats. So it feels like Republicans are saying my way or the highway. They are saying that here in Congress. And that's just not how legislation works, especially in divided government. I do think that there's a chance we could see Biden do some executive action on this. There's already been some reporting about this. I

I think politically that would be really smart for him. And like, I realized that a lot of the executive action, it's not going to go as far as this bipartisan border deal. Like if you want to totally change how fast asylum claims are processed, you have to throw appropriations money at that. You have to have more judges. You have to have more detention beds and all this kind of stuff. So like there's only so much he can do from executive action, but I wouldn't be surprised if he does something. What can he do?

on executive action? Well, you know, there's talk about, you know, turning away migrants who show up between...

ports of entry who are trying to claim asylum and just saying, you can't, you just can't come in here. You're going to have to go and you have to go through a different asylum process. I don't know if he is able to raise the bar on asylum like they were trying to do in this legislation. It's a big question mark. I actually don't know. And the other thing that the White House could try to do is they could try to enact new policies that maybe won't be held up in the courts, but they know that.

and push the limits on that to try to show the public that they actually care about this issue. Let the courts deal with it. It probably is going to be put on hold and it's going to be like duped out in the courts, but that in theory still could protect him politically. It gets him a headline, gets him a number of headlines about him, you know, trying to fight.

Like student debt forgiveness. Yeah. And I mean, that goes against Joe Biden's gut instinct. I mean, he's a longtime senator, spent decades on Capitol Hill. He sort of used Washington as this more traditional sense that Congress writes the laws, the executive branch carries them out. But

I mean, he's he should be politically taking a lesson from Donald Trump, who, when Congress didn't do what he wanted, he did his own executive action, went to the courts to fight it out and, you know, was able to sort of play to his base that way. Perhaps Biden can do the same thing from the White House, but play to the more independent swing voters who want him to do more.

Yeah. I mean, this seems like a pretty toxic issue for both parties on different dimensions. There's clearly demand for Biden to do something from independent voters who say they trust the Republican Party more on this. Equally, though, the solution that was proposed didn't seem like the type of thing that would have been all that popular with American people. It never really got pulled because it died so quickly. So we don't really know. The bipartisan border bill was popular with the American people.

to the tune of like two thirds of Americans in the polling that we had. Yeah, I would be shocked if it wasn't because it really I mean, it was a bunch of conservative policy. I mean, we see in the polling that people want asylum to be harder to get. Right. That's like something like across the board. This would have made it a lot harder to get asylum. It would have like ended what Republicans called catch and release where migrants show up. They say, I need to claim asylum. Then they're released into the country and sort of disappear while they're waiting for their court date. Like that is done.

And that is like a huge concern for, you know, Republicans and swing voters. So I would be shocked if it wasn't popular because, I mean, there were some real policy wins for the right. I was thinking the, you know, I was just assuming that the specific proposals on stuff like the hard, the hard cap on any entry after a certain point and the sort of arbitrariness of the HHS being able to.

able to actually declare more people fully, uh, sort of fully granted asylum arbitrarily would have been unpopular, but, um, I'm happy, I'm happy to be fact-checked on it. The American public, um, has grown quite hawkish on immigration. I, and I think, like, Yeah, no, the hawkishness, I, I think would be the popular part. I, I think the, the sort of, the bipartisan part of this that, that gave authority to HHS to allow more people in, uh,

when they weren't meeting the cap would have been unpopular. But again, I haven't seen the poll. This shows, though, that the Republicans have been much better about spinning what's in this bill because the bill doesn't do that. I mean, they've been seizing on this number. Once you get to 5000, that's when the border closes or whatever mandatory mandatory closing. If you look at the numbers right now, sometimes they're above like 10000. So it's not that they're allowing more people to come in at all.

In fact, there would be a higher sense of asylum claim. Those people wouldn't be released into the country. Like they could come try to claim asylum, but most of them under the new changes would be turned away. So but but this again shows the the ability to sort of spin this as we're actually going to open the borders as opposed to what it would really do, which is interesting.

Yeah, I think the sort of demands from the left and from much of the Democratic Party for Biden to like not compromise in this sort of severe of a way is probably politically damaging for the Democrats in a year. And it's probably their biggest single – the issue where voters both care about it and trust Republicans much more than Democrats. Yeah.

It was clear that they have to do something. But in an election year, that's kind of a tough prediction. All right. Well, this has been a podcast full of sort of hard-hitting, contentious issues for both parties. I want to end things on a little bit of a lighter note, and we're going to do that with our good or bad use of polling example.

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Last July, Echelon Insights conducted a poll that I'll just say, I'll come out and say it up front, that I really liked, where they asked voters to identify RFK Jr. between two photos, one of actual RFK Jr. and one of his father. And the responses were pretty interesting. So 59% of respondents chose correctly, while 41% chose incorrectly, chose RFK Jr.'s father, RFK.

Now, that was last summer. It's been like eight months or so since then. They asked this again in their February voter omnibus poll. And this time, 64% of respondents chose correctly, while 36% chose incorrectly. That's up only five points since last July incorrectly.

in terms of people who can correctly identify RFK Jr. Now get this, those who had a very unfavorable view of RFK Jr. correctly identified him more than his biggest supporters. Again, people who have a negative view of RFK Jr. are more likely to know who he is than people who have a positive view of RFK Jr. Is this a good or bad use of polling? We'll start with you, Elliot.

Yeah, I think it's great. I think it's fun. I think there's a sort of time-honored tradition of showing just how much the American people know about individual politicians, and it's not a whole lot. The thing that came to my mind when I saw this was this polling that came out right before the war in Ukraine started, or maybe right after, that showed if you gave Americans a map and said, like, pick out Ukraine, only 30% of people could say where it was. There's a lot of people who said they knew where it was and then picked, like, Greenland or Canada. Yeah.

I mean, that is to some extent. Wait, Canada, that's trolling. I don't know. So I think a lot of it is not taking the survey correctly or people just speeding through it for money. Like it's a low quality survey respondents. But anyhow, yeah, like, look, this is great showing how people are, how much people actually know, especially when they're maybe misleading you, the pollster about how much they know. It's good. Just appalling. It's great. It's fun.

Rachel? Yeah, I like it too. It's definitely fun to look at. Part of me also thinks, you know, RFK wants people to be confused about this because he's really leaning on the family name and might be sort of hoping that people are ignorant so that they'll check the box behind, you know, the Kennedy name. So I do think that that percentage of people who, like, you know, correctly identify him as

Well, it hasn't gone up a lot in the past few months. Like as soon as we get to like Biden's a nominee officially, well, he is Trump's the nominee officially. And now it's like off to the races. No more primary to worry about. No more Nikki Haley versus DeSantis, blah, blah, blah. Like I'm sure that those numbers are going to probably go up a lot faster in the next few months. But actually, who knows? But I would expect they would.

Yeah, and I'll say to... I mean, I already said that I like this poll. It's fun to do a good or bad use of polling example where we actually just unabashedly like the poll. Oftentimes, we're just, during this segment, dragging polls. But I will say, like...

polls that just try to be like, oh, Americans are stupid. I don't like those kinds of polls. And for a lot of these questions, it's not Americans' job to know policy details or like the ins and outs of things that politicians are dealing with in Washington. That's why we have representative government. It's because

Our job is to determine who will well represent us in Washington. And then it's those people's job to understand the policy ins and outs and do what's best for the country to make it prosperous and secure and all of those things. That's the idea behind representative government.

However, this is not just asking Americans, do you know where Ukraine is or do you know X or Y detail of policy? It's do you know the actual politician you say that you're supporting? And in representative government, that's really f***ed.

important. That's the whole point, right? Like if this is going to work where we hire people to do the work of making policy and hashing out differences and whatever, you got to know who you're hiring. You got to know the identity of the person that you're hiring. And the fact that people who support him the most are less likely to know who he is than the people who oppose him the most. Like you said, Rachel, he probably is into that. He probably likes that idea.

To give the American people a little bit of credit, there's probably a non-zero number of people who know who he is but don't know what he looks like. And that's fine. You don't have to know what they look like to vote for them or to know what they stand for. But it is a good use of polling nonetheless. It's fun. All right. And with that, we are done for the day. Thank you so much, Rachel and Elliot. This has been a fun podcast with plenty of debate. Thanks. Yay!

And I'll just say before we go, I know that the podcast schedule has been a little bit off this week. We had our South Carolina reaction Saturday night slash Sunday. We have our what normally comes out on Thursday podcast today in reaction to

to Michigan. We're going to be slightly more on schedule next week, but only slightly. So on Monday, we are going to preview Super Tuesday. Then Tuesday night, we're going to do a late night reaction podcast. But then we are also going to have a third podcast next week, a late night podcast on Thursday reacting to the State of the Union address. Assuming that it still happens, I think everyone believes that it will. Although if there is a partial government shutdown, maybe that throws some sticks and spokes. Who knows? But as things stand now, you can expect a

three podcasts next week on that schedule. With that, my name is Galen Druk. Tony Chow is in the control room. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Tretavian, and our intern is Jayla Everett. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon.