Data: Migration Issues Flipped Swing Voters to Donald Trump

The damage done by President Joe Biden’s migration policy pushed a large share of undecided swing voters to support Donald Trump during the last week of the 2024 campaign, according to a report by BluePrint2024, a pro-Democrat polling firm.

The polling data helps to explain why Democrats are moving closer to blaming Biden and his pro-migration border chief — Alejandro Mayorkas — for their political disaster.

“We destroyed ourselves on the immigration issue in ways that were entirely predictable and entirely manageable,” a Democratic senator told the Hill for a November 29 report.

So far, immigration lobbyists are blaming Democrats. “The public completely rejected President Biden’s immigration agenda because … he never defined exactly what it was,” said Andrea Flores, the chief lobbyist at FWD.us, the most important pro-migration lobby. {snip}

The BluePrint2024 data showed in a November 15 report:

Swing voters broke for Trump 52% versus just 38% for Harris. Nearly half of swing voters who chose Trump made their decision in the final weeks, including 27% in the final days [emphasis added] (15% in the last week, 12% on Election Day), suggesting they were genuinely up for grabs. This is substantially later than swing voters who broke for Harris—just 15% of whom decided in the last week or on Election Day.

Immigration was a key issue among this late-deciding, pro-Trump 27 percent, wrote Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge who now works at the Center for Immigration Studies:

Among total swing voters who ultimately chose Trump, immigration was a key issue, with 77 percent of them believing that it was “extremely” or “very accurate” to say Democrats are “not tough enough on addressing the border crisis” and 73 percent feeling the same way about Democrats “support[ing] immigrants more than American citizens”.

Moreover, 73 percent of Trump-supporting swing voters thought it was either extremely or very accurate to state that Democrats “want to take money from hard-working Americans and give it to immigrants”, 72 percent of them believed it is fair to think Democrats “don’t care about securing the border”, and 69 percent concurred with the statement that Democrats “have extreme ideas about immigration”.

The BluePrint2024 report noted that voters want Democrats to improve their immigration policies:

Respondents were asked to choose up to two issues they want to see the Democratic Party focus on moving forward.

Inflation and prices emerge as voters’ clear priority for Democratic focus (46%), particularly among swing voters (52%), followed by immigration (24%). Democracy (17%), abortion (17%), and healthcare (16%) form a second tier of priorities, mainly among base Democrats.

{snip}