One key reason for Donald Trump’s dominance in the GOP presidential race may be hiding in plain sight: Even compared to 2016, the Republican electorate has moved sharply to the right on immigration. That shift on one of Trump’s signature issues has tightened his grip on the party.
Amid widespread discontent over President Joe Biden’s management of the border, the overall electorate is moving rightward on immigration too, polls show. If Trump wins the nomination, the question will be whether swing voters are willing to move as far as he’s proposing with his explicit promise to pursue a militarized door-to-door mass deportation drive, including the construction of detention camps, to speed the removal of more undocumented immigrants than the US has ever tried to deport at one time. Both Biden and Trump are planning to visit the border on Thursday – an early indication of how large a role immigration will play in a likely general election rematch between them.
For now, there’s no question that hardening GOP attitudes on immigration have been critical to Trump’s strong performance through the early primaries. In 2016, as I wrote at the time, exit polls asked GOP voters in 20 states whether “illegal immigrants working in the US” should be “offered legal status” or “deported to [their] home country.” In every state except Alabama and Mississippi, less than half of 2016 GOP primary voters said those in the US illegally should be deported, according to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations including CNN.
But already this year, a majority of GOP primary voters in both New Hampshire and South Carolina, the two states where the question was asked, have said that most undocumented immigrants should be deported, the exit polls found. In New Hampshire, the results virtually flipped from 2016….
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