We already know the kind of campaign Donald Trump will run in 2020. Sure, there will be improvisational flourishes based on who ultimately prevails from the Democrat’s battle royal—stale riffs on Joe Biden’s intelligence, Elizabeth Warren’s ancestry, or Bernie Sanders’s democratic socialism. But facing tough elections, Trump returns to immigration, the issue that won him the Republican primary and, perhaps, the presidency. The final months of the 2020 election will undoubtedly feature a cavalcade of offensive, racist, and purely fictional ads about how undocumented immigrants are menacing innocent Americans, and dozens of stump speeches touting the “wall,” with Trump still insisting it’s being built.

The president will be banking on the current conventional wisdom, which maintains that immigration is a weak spot for Democrats. Despite Trump’s divisive appeals, recent polling has suggested that voters believe that Democrats politicize the issue about as much as the president does. That is, to some extent, a strange conclusion, given that Democratic candidates have shied away from making immigration a campaign centerpiece, and have instead focused so far on other issues. The Democrats’ plans, to the extent they have been surfaced, often feel like kinder takes on hardline Republican positions: They hold on to their commitment to “border security” like a shield in an attempt to weather, but never really counter, GOP attacks.



But there are signs that immigration may not be the soft, white underbelly for Democrats that headlines and talking heads would have us believe. A Washington Post-ABC poll released Tuesday suggests that voters are still allergic to Trump’s draconian approach—the wall remains extremely unpopular, with two voters opposing it for every one who supports it. Additionally, the survey demonstrates an openness to immigration proposals that move beyond “securing” (and presumably further militarizing) the border. A number of presidential candidates—Beto O’Rourke, Cory Booker, and, most significantly, Julián Castro—have embraced the issue, making it clear that the days of Democrats trying to change the subject whenever immigration comes up may be coming to an end.

The public dialogue on immigration tends to be a mess, albeit a mess that helps explain the inertia that has enveloped policymaking. Broadly speaking, polls show Americans supporting some version of the grand bargain that the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” almost made in 2013 (and which still gets teased by some Democrats)—more “border security” coupled with a “path to citizenship.” A February Gallup poll found that 81 percent favored a “path to citizenship” for undocumented immigrants and that 75 percent supported hiring “significantly more” agents to patrol the border, although nearly two-thirds opposed the construction of a wall.

But a vocal minority who opposes a path to citizenship has been able to block any movement on policy, thanks in part to their overrepresentation in conservative media. An April Gallup survey found just twenty-one percent viewed immigration as the most important issue in the country. The Post-ABC poll, meanwhile, found that the number of voters of all stripes concerned about the border is growing. Fifty-six percent of Republicans, 35 percent of independents, and 24 percent of Democrats—up from just 7 percent in January—described “the situation with illegal immigration at the US-Mexico border” as a “crisis.”