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www.newsindiatimes.com – that’s all you need to know Opinion News India Times (May 3, 2025 - May 9, 2025) May 9, 2025 4 Disclaimer:The views and opinions expressed on this page are those of the authors and Parikh Worldwide Media does not officially endorse, and is not responsible or liable for them. Is Trump Breaking Up HisWinning Coalition? both higher- and lower-than-average levels of educa- tion. Local election data can’t tell us which individual voters in a given community shifted Republican, so there’s some amount of ambiguity here, but the CES data also found a similar swing of about 13 points toward Republicans among both college-educated and non-college-educated immigrants. (By contrast, exit polls found Democrats mostly holding steady with the broader group of college-educated voters, while non- college voters careened to the right.) Similarly, while poorer immigrant communities certainly swung to the right by larger margins, both the CES and election returns suggest that high-income immigrant areas shifted toward Trump as well in the most recent election, which is unlike what we saw with the high-income voting electorate at large in most exit polling. (Two major exit polls, Edison and AP VoteCast, even found that voters making more than $100,000 a year shifted left relative to 2020.) Few would have predicted this a decade ago. The conventional wisdom on immigrants was that they would be inherently hostile to the Republican Party’s anti-immigration positions. Just cast your mind back to 2012, when Mitt Romney’s immigration platform was blamed for costing him critical support among His- panic voters, while President Barack Obama’s decision to offer protections from deportation to “dreamers” was seen as a winning gambit. When Trump won in 2016 on an even more aggressively restrictionist and antago- nistic campaign, his victory was mostly a result of his gains with blue-collarWhite voters in swing states, not immigrants. Given Trump’s regular calls for mass deportations in 2024, the most recent realignment might seem counter- intuitive. Many still assume that naturalized voters and their children are a steadfast bulwark for the Demo- cratic Party, a notion that has leached its way into the darker undertones of public discourse, with Elon Musk recently calling Democratic immigration policies “voter importation scams,” implying that new immigrants could permanently tilt the map against Republicans. The data suggests that this could not be more off- base. The numbers show that immigrants who came to the United States, became citizens and then voted in the most recent election likely defected from Demo- crats at an extremely high rate, even higher than that of citizens-by-birth. Why? YouGov’s pre-election polling data, shared with The Post, found that immigrants rated the economy as their top issue in 2024, and that immigrant non-White voters were significantly more likely than native-born non-White voters to view crime as a determining fac- tor in their vote. On both of these topics, Republicans held issue-specific edges with the overall electorate in 2024. Additionally, moderate and liberal immigrants were much less likely to view abortion as particularly important to their vote, which helped neutralize one of Democrats’ strongest issues. But YouGov’s results yielded another particularly striking finding: Among virtually every subgroup, im- migrants were less likely than natural-born citizens to view immigration as a particularly important topic in deciding their vote - despite Trump and his surrogates being extremely vocal with hostile, anti-immigration rhetoric in the lead-up to the election, mainly directed at recent migrants from Central American countries and Haiti. Anecdotally, reporting also found that established immigrant communities often shared non-immigrant Americans’ concerns about pressures on public ser- vices tied to the latest rush of asylum seekers, lending credence to speculation that Trump’s electoral strength on immigration extended to immigrants themselves. In other words, a share of immigrant voters might have supported him because of his emphasis on enforce- ment, not in spite of it. Polling now suggests that Trump’s overall strength on immigration is rapidly declining. YouGov’s latest poll, for example, found that respondents now disapprove of his handling of the issue by a 50-45 margin. This is probably driven by his recent emphasis on specific ac- tions that are less popular with Americans: The same poll found, by a 50-28 margin, that respondents wanted him to return Kilmar Abrego García, an Salvadoran man accidentally deported fromMaryland to a detention center in his home country, back to the United States. AWashington Post-ABC News-Ipsos survey last week also found majority disapproval of Trump’s immigra- tion record, and nearly 6 in 10 respondents said they opposed deporting students who criticize U.S. policy in the Middle East. Sidestepping due process and targeting longtime residents with either protection from deportation or some form of legal status is unpopular in polls of the broader electorate so far, but it’s worth paying particular attention to whether it leads immigrant voters to recon- sider the nature of the president’s immigration agenda and whether it might impact their communities more directly than they thought. That’s especially true given that the anti-inflation brand that they might have been most attracted to is also losing its luster. Trump is now frequently deep underwater on questions about trade and prices, and his overall economic approval was a net minus-12 points in the latest YouGov poll, in line with many other surveys. If immigrant voters turn on Trump, it could rapidly unravel a key new addition to the Republican coali- tion. But there are few surveys with large sample sizes of naturalized immigrants or that regularly single them out for polling, and a combination of challenges posed by language, nonresponse and data reliability make it harder (and more expensive) for pollsters to track their attitudes. If there’s a major shift, it might take some time to detect it, and the results of the 2025 gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey to help confirm it. Regardless of what happens next, foreign-born voters now make up about 10 percent of the U.S. electorate. The bloc’s dramatic shift toward Trump played a key role in his victory over Kamala Harris, even as other demo- graphic groups remained relatively stable compared with 2020. Whether Repub- licans can hold on to this new- found support remains one of the biggest questions heading into 2026 and beyond. Lakshya Jain and Max McCall are partners at Split Ticket, an election data analysis firm. - Special to TheWashington Post - Continued From Page 3 PHOTOS:TheWashington Post Photo:X@lxeagle17