Media coverage of Kilmar Abrego Garcia hurt Trump, not Democrats
Public opinion on immigration has shifted — and pundits need to catch up
A group of center-left Democratic strategists, politicians, and commentators met at "WelcomeFest" in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday to figure out what went wrong in 2024 and how to compete in the future. The event is put on by Welcome PAC, a group that says it wants to "reach out to mainstream Americans — not just those who pass all the progressive purity tests." (I guess progressives aren’t welcome in the Welcome Party.)
One of the speakers at the event was Matthew Yglesias, who has become something of a supposed moderates-whisperer for Democratic candidates and strategists over the last year. His short speech to the conference focused on how activists who say loud, left-leaning things push the public to view Democrats as more left-leaning, when voters want the party to be in the center. The theory is that this hurts the party at the ballot box.
According to Yglesias, one of the ways activists do this is by manipulating polling data. Quoting from his presentation:
The main theory of action that a lot of these left advocacy groups have is they put out polling that isn't correct. We all know that you can manipulate through question wording, get what you want, and so everybody says our issue is super popular!
And he thinks this blinds Democratic elected officials to public opinion. Quoting again:
And it also creates bad incentives. I was talking to people who said, "You know, everybody knows that immigration is kinda Trump's strongest issue, why do you have so many people making bad press on this?" Well, you know, these guys are from safe seats, you know, so they do it, and people like it.
This is all pretty standard "popularist" stuff, which I don't want to take on as a whole right now. Instead, I want to focus on a comparatively narrow point Yglesias is making about immigration, and about a recent news event in particular.
When Yglesias delivered the quote above, he showed on screen a clipping of a PBS headline that read "More Democratic lawmakers visit El Salvador to see Abrego Garcia." The story is about four U.S. House Democrats who traveled to the country to try to see Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland dad wrongly deported to El Salvador in violation of a U.S. court order in April.
The claim Yglesias is making is that focusing on — or, to use his words, "raising the salience of" — immigration shifts public opinion (both on this issue and in general) toward Republicans. And in particular, he is arguing that Democrats "making headlines" about Kilmar Abrego Garcia hurt the party.
Well, hey, these are empirically testable claims, and this newsletter is all about using data to inform our understanding of politics and elections. So let's test them!
Did headlines about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, or deportations and immigration more broadly, hurt or help Democrats? And what about the public's approval of deportations?
I've taken a look at trends in media coverage, Donald Trump's immigration approval, and even experimental survey data on Abrego Garcia and deportations. They all point to the same conclusion: Matthew Yglesias is wrong about public opinion on Kilmar Abrego Garcia. It’s not that he's wrong about 2024. Rather, in June of 2025, the data on the issue has changed — and when the data changes, we change our minds.
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Survey experiment suggests Republican weakness on more extreme deportations
The first piece of evidence I will point you to is an experiment we did in our May Strength In Numbers/Verasight survey of 1,000 voters. In this experiment, we asked two questions about immigration. For half of our sample, we asked respondents whether they supported deporting all immigrants who are in America illegally, and then presented respondents with information about Abrego Garcia's case. Then we asked them whether they supported bringing Abrego Garcia back to America.
The second half of our sample got these questions in reverse order: first, information about Abrego Garcia, and then the question about blanket mass deportations.
The respondents who saw our question about Abrego Garcia second — the control group — supported blanket deportations by 16 points, 49% to 33%. For this group, we can think of immigration attitudes as representing a no-information, tabula rasa status quo.
And because we did this experiment in early May, the news environment represented one in which many respondents had not heard about the Abrego Garcia case, or that he was a father—and that a judge had ordered immigration officials not to deport him to El Salvador.
By contrast, the group that saw the messaging about Abrego Garcia first was much more opposed to mass deportation. Just 39% supported deporting all undocumented immigrants, with 43% opposed. In other words, net approval for mass deportation fell by 20 percentage points once respondents learned about Abrego Garcia's case. An effect of this magnitude roughly matches the total decline in Trump’s approval rating on deportations since early March, according to YouGov.
That's a pretty striking drop, and it suggested that as more people learned about how extensive Trump's mass deportation plan had become, support for it would fall. This is validated by observational evidence.
Trump's immigration approval fell after a spike in Garcia headlines
Now let's take a look at Trump's overall approval on the issue of immigration. Our benchmark for this is an average of polls that ask people, "Do you approve or disapprove of how the president is handling the issue of immigration?"
We are interested in how Trump's immigration changed over the evolution of the news cycle about Abrego Garcia. If we see that Trump's approval rating falls after the news about Abrego Garcia picks up, that is a strong indicator that Trump is weak on Democratic arguments about deportation.
In the chart below, I have plotted two lines. One line shows the relative intensity of media coverage about Abrego Garcia. I calculated this by counting up the daily mentions of Abrego Garcia in headlines and descriptions attached to online news articles from both major media organizations and popular digital outlets.
The other line shows Trump's approval rating on immigration, rescaled so that it matches the scale for the media headlines line.
View an interactive version of this chart here.
This analysis shows that Trump's approval rating on immigration fell precipitously the day after media attention to the Abrego Garcia case peaked, on April 20. Then, as that attention fell, Trump's approval rating recovered.
This finding can be repeated using alternative metrics. If instead of media headlines, for example, you use relative search interest on Google (which lags the media measure by about three days), the pattern is even stronger. And the trend in Trump’s overall approval is also a strong dependent variable (since overall and issue-specific approval is highly correlated).
In terms of statistical tests, from April 1 to June 4, search interest is a statistically significant predictor of both the level and trend in Trump's approval. (R screenshots in the footnotes.)1
And if you invert the Trump approval trend and shift the series by a few days so their peaks match, you can see the relationship even more clearly:
We can also see that the sentiment of news headlines — how positive or negative the words used are — changed sharply after the Abrego Garcia news, and has since recovered. In the plot below, I chart a 14-day rolling average of the sentiment of all news headlines published at memeorandum.com, an algorithmic news aggregator, from January 1, 2025, to June 4, 2025.2
I mean, is there really anything else left to say?
Democrats have partially redefined immigration in their favor
In one of the first articles I wrote at this Substack, I made the point that poll questions about Trump's broad approval on immigration do not capture the nuances of public opinion on the issue. When I looked at the individual policy proposals of the administration, I found they were much more unpopular than Trump's lead on the issue suggested.
Proposals like deporting undocumented immigrants who have lived here for decades, and deporting people who crossed the border and have since had children who are U.S. citizens, are favored by 30% of the public on average and opposed by almost 70%. These are 70-30 issues in Democrats' favor.
In more recent articles, I suggested that Republican overreach on immigration — such as deporting Abrego Garcia — could be used to erode Trump's broader position on immigration. By highlighting the unpopular parts of his immigration and mass deportation agenda that overreach public opinion, Democrats could redefine the issue in a way that disadvantaged Trump. Instead of people thinking of immigrants and crime — as Trump defined the issue in 2024 — when politicians mentioned immigrants, Democrats could make them think more about deportation of parents and residents.
In that article, I wrote:
3 Opinion changes with new information and arguments from party leader
This is another obvious point that I feel compelled to make since I haven't really seen it out in the wild, and that is this: Public opinion can change based on new information and engagement from party leaders! Trump's approval on immigration policy in general has fallen from about +10 last month to +5 today.
[...]
Party issue ownership is known to shift over time as conditions and ruling parties change. This is because voters respond to cues from their leaders and the eventual evidence we receive on the success of certain policies. There is no reason to expect that Republicans will continue to lead on immigration if Democrats message on it.
This has turned out to be pretty much exactly what happened. Future opinion is not the same as current opinion, and public opinion about immigration moved after the press started covering the Abrego Garcia case. Recently, even some Trump supporters have publicly expressed dissatisfaction with the administration's moves.
In 2024, Democrats lost in part because the party was out of step with public opinion on immigration. But the political situation around immigration has changed since then. I think it’s time we adjust our priors, too.
Yglesias ends his short speech by giving three recommendations to people who want to build the party. One of them is:
"Accurate public opinion research is really good."
I agree. And when new public opinion research contradicts our beliefs, we should revisit and revise them accordingly.
To do this, I had to scrape the metadata of 15,000 news headlines programmatically using Python, and then I scored the text with a local LLM sentiment model using Hugging Face. Please subscribe to Strength In Numbers so my AI tokens don’t bankrupt the business bank account
I think left-leaning centrists talk about Dem opinion like it's malleable and GOP opinion like it's the tides because they believe they and most of their audience can't possibly overcome the influence of right-wing media. But even if that's true of the current MAGA hardcore, that group is not most people, and there's no need to give everyone up to MAGA framing.
Centrists also present themselves as pragmatists even in the context of their perceived audience. "People trust Trump on immigration and less on the economy so why waste effort on the former." But, like, obviously people can change their beliefs based on messaging on immigration. Many of them distrust Dems not as a result of lived experience but because they were told "migrant crime" every day for a year and then told "they're eating the dogs." So introduce to them some reason to distrust the GOP here - they don't verify their target, they don't obey the courts, they don't prioritize, they do in fact go after "one of the good ones," they use unnecessary cruelty, they assume everyone including citizens are lying to them. They simply are not trustworthy Trust in the GOP on immigration is not a rule of nature.
Persuasive data and analysis, GEM. Well done!