Americans don't want mass deportations | Weekly roundup for July 20, 2025

This week in political data: Epstein and Trump, NPR, and the missing 2020 Biden voters. + for the first time in his second term, Trump has a lower approval rating on deportations than on the economy.

Dear readers,

Welcome back to Strength In Numbers. This is your Sunday briefing covering new data on politics and public opinion.

Apologies to readers who prefer to receive this first thing in the morning; I wrote this later today because a few polls were coming out that I wanted to include.

One note before beginning! This is your last call for the July Q&A, which comes out next week. Email submissions to questions@gelliottmorris.com.

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Americans don’t want mass deportations

Today, new polls from both CBS News/YouGov and CNN/SSRS find that Trump’s agenda for mass deportations is deeply unpopular.

In the CBS News poll, Trump’s approval rating on deportation is down from 59% at the start of his term to 49% today, and 52% of adults say he is deporting more people than they expected. Fifty-eight percent oppose the way the administration is using detention facilities, such as “Alligator Alcatraz.”

CNN finds even deeper opposition to Trump’s immigration/deportation agenda, including 59% opposed to deporting non-criminal unauthorized immigrants (vs 23% support) and 57% opposed to building new “detention facilities” for migrants (26% support). Here’s their graphic, from the indispensable Ariel Edwards-Levy:

This is the latest in a long series of polls showing the individual components of Trump’s immigration policy are unpopular. As I’ve written, we should expect that deficits like this will continue to lead to lower overall Trump approval numbers on immigration/deportations etc.

Also notable: CNN finds that partisan prioritization of immigration has shifted since Trump’s inauguration, with Democrats much likelier to say this is their most important issue:

Asked in the same survey to name the issue they consider most important, 20% of Americans mention immigration, ranking it second only to economic concerns.

While that’s similar overall to January, the partisan dynamics of the issue have shifted somewhat. At the start of the year, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents were 26 points likelier than those aligned with the Democratic Party to mention immigration. Now, while it’s still a more potent issue among Republicans than Democrats, that gap has narrowed to 10 points amid the rising Democratic opposition to Trump’s deportation policies.

We are starting to see opinion trend away from the GOP both in overall policy support and partisan intensity/agenda-setting. I wouldn’t be surprised if by this time next year, public opinion was the mirror image of attitudes under Joe Biden — that is, a big Democratic advantage. A good reminder to keep your eye on the ball, opinion-wise: What matters is not what opinion is today, but what it’ll be during the next election.

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What you missed at Strength In Numbers

SIN published three articles last week:

• An early look at generic ballot polls and what they say for 2026, for paying members.

• Trump’s approval hit a new low this week, and polls show his moves on the Epstein files are 42 percentage points underwater.

• And here’s last week’s data roundup.

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Even more numbers!

• Researchers at the polling firm Survey160 have released a report into the accuracy of AI-generated poll samples. They’re pretty bad.

• Political science professor Lindsey Cormack points out that Democrats have done dramatically little to push against Republican attacks on NPR/PBS. That contrasts with past campaigns, when Democrats sent a lot of pro-public media emails to their fundraising lists.

• Zikai Li, a PhD student in political science at the University of Chicago, looked at all of the Biden-era investments in jobs and clean energy and found they did not increase vote share for Kamala Harris in 2024, all else being equal. “Deliverism” is dead.

• Another CNN poll number: Enthusiasm for voting in the midterms is way higher among Democrats than Republicans. Here’s their graphic:

  

• MIT poli sci prof Charles Stewart III points out that Google searches for Epstein are coming disproportionately from Democratic states.

• Lake Research has a nice slide deck for your perusal on the “missing Biden voters.” They used survey and voter file data to identify people who voted for Biden in 2020 but not Harris in 2024. Some findings include:

  • Dem drop-off voters wanted to hear more about economics, especially the cost of living

  • The most common news source for Dem drop-off voters is YouTube, followed by Cable TV, Facebook, and digital news websites

  • Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are the most popular politicians among 2024 Dem drop-off voters

  • The most popular policy proposals for these voters is expanding affordable health insurance, increasing taxes on the super-wealthy, and getting rid of junk fees. (Should be easy to message on for 2026!)

• I’ve been working with Verasight, our partner on the Strength In Numbers poll, on some surveys about AI adoption. You can check out our first report here.

• Here is a roundup of charts published in the first half of this year by the Data and Democracy Substack. I don’t agree with everything written in this publication, but the charts are good, and the general thrust of their work on authoritarianism is something I strongly get behind.

• Finally, while it’s not data, I recommend this essay from Terry Moran on the cowardice of Paramount executives buckling to Trump re: CBS News/60 Minutes/Stephen Colbert. Moran says that “silence and complicity are good business.” This matches my personal experience with corporate news executives, too.

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Updates from the data portal

• Trump’s approval rating has ticked up slightly, but within the uncertainty interval:

  

• And the president remains underwater on key issues:

  

The charts on the data portal update every day. Feel free to use and cite them liberally!

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And that’s it for this week!

If you have any feedback on the format or content of this post, email me at feedback@gelliottmorris.com or submit it anonymously here. I read every email I receive.

Thanks for being a part of our nerdy little corner of the internet. I’m glad we have this space,

Elliott