Exit Poll: Joe Biden’s Migration Moved Voters to GOP

biden border
John Moore/Getty Images/Inset Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

President Joe Biden’s pro-migration policy has its day of reckoning on November 8 — and the exit polls showed deep public opposition to the establishment’s long-standing policy of importing millions of wage-cutting workers, consumers, and renters.

The exit polls quizzed 12,458 people. They were funded by a conglomerate of media outlets and showed that 60 percent of voters disapproved of Biden’s border policy — and that immigration was the second-most important issue for GOP voters:

Ten percent of all voters declared immigration to be the most important issue.

Nationwide, 52 percent of voters told the pollsters that they have more trust in the GOP to handle migration. Forty-four percent said they trust Democrats more.

On immigration, Latino voters split 38 percent for the GOP, and 60 percent for Democrats.

Overall, 39 percent of all voters said “immigrants ….do more to hurt the country,” while 53 percent said immigrants help the country.

The 39 percent “more to hurt” number is a sharp increase amid President Joe Biden’s mass migration of illegal and legal migrants.

In July, a 35 percent plurality in a YouGov poll said immigration makes the United States “worse off,” while 31 percent said immigration makes the U.S. “better off.”

In another YouGov poll in September 2019, the “worse off” number was just 19 percent, and the “better off” number was 43 percent. The two YouGov polls added up to a 28-point shift in public opinion in three years.

The Exit Poll numbers are tilted by partisan differences — including the voters’ willingness to accept the agenda set by their party’s leaders.

Democrat voters touted a few issues emphasized by the leaders, chiefly abortion, guns, climate, or “democracy.” So the Democrat voters downplayed immigration amid Biden’s chaotic and unpopular policy.

In contrast, GOP leaders do not hold the White House, and they have little influence in the media. So the populist GOP voters — and swing voters — are more likely to push their priorities into the election, including immigration, inflation, and crime. This populist push ensured that one-in-seven GOP voters marked immigration as their most important issue — ensuring that the GOP leaders cannot win elections without promising significant immigration reforms.

Still, many donor-backed GOP candidates have spent much of the election trying to minimize the pocketbook impact of immigration, and to instead portray migration as an issue of crime or chaos.

The House GOP’s leaders have promised to curb President Joe Biden’s huge inflow of illegal workers, renters, and consumers through the southern border.

Since 1965, the federal government’s extraction of migrants from poor countries has forced down Americans’ wages.

It has also boosted rents and housing prices, and it has reduced native-born Americans’ clout in local and national elections. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of fields and spiked the number of “Deaths of Despair.”

Many polls show the public wants to welcome some immigration. But the polls also show deep and broad public opposition to labor migration and to the inflow of temporary contract workers into the jobs needed by the families of blue-collar and white-collar Americans.

This “Third Rail” opposition is growinganti-establishmentmultiracialcross-sexnon-racistclass-basedbipartisan,   rationalpersistent, and recognizes the solidarity that American citizens owe to one another.

Prior exit polls were often wrong, partly because it has been difficult for the pollsters to interview a representative sample of all voters. CNN described the poll’s methodology:

The 2022 exit polls include interviews with thousands of voters, both those who cast a ballot on Election Day and those who voted early or absentee. That scope makes them a powerful tool for understanding the demographic profile and political views of voters in this year’s election. And their findings will eventually be weighted against the ultimate benchmark: the results of the elections themselves. Even so, exit polls are still polls, with margins for error – which means they’re most useful when treated as estimates, rather than precise measurements. That’s particularly true for the earliest exit poll numbers, which haven’t yet been adjusted to match final election results.

CNN Exit Polls are a combination of in-person interviews with Election Day voters and in-person interviews, telephone and online polls measuring the views of early and absentee by-mail voters. They were conducted by Edison Research on behalf of the National Election Pool. In-person interviews on Election Day were conducted at a random sample of 250 polling locations. The results also include interviews with early and absentee voters conducted in-person at 72 early voting locations, by phone or online. Results for the full sample of 12,458 respondents have a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points; it is larger for subgroups

COMMENTS

Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.