I’m Glad Tim Pushed Back on Longwell’s Immigration Analysis

So ofc I really like both Tim and Sarah…and I disagree with Sarah on a lot of stuff (most things perhaps), but I admire her integrity and transparency. Same with Tim ofc.

That said, when Longwell said the GOP “won” on immigration and woke in yesterday’s Next Level pod…I’m not so sure about that actually. If you look at the relevant polling regarding immigration policy, most Americans actually do like legal immigration and immigration as a concept. MAGA and MAGA loyalists think all immigration is bad bc of racial and cultural and paleoconservative ugliness. Furthermore, most support Dreamers and a pathway to citizenship for those who have lived here for a while. Where Trump indisputably “won” was on further polarizing ppl and making salient resentment over illegal immigration (and then connecting that to financial hardship and social despair). Meanwhile, Trump is already erecting dystopian prison camps for migrants in Guantanamo and trying to overturn the 14th Amendment. That is not popular and most Americans will reject that.

I like Sarah, but she is acquiescing to this flawed conventional wisdom in Beltway media that woke and immigration are objectively unpopular and won Trump the presidency and he now has a mandate to go all Sicario on the cartels and send migrants to prison camps and tinker with birthright citizenship. It was the 2019 ACLU event that did Harris in, or one ad that ran in the battlegrounds during football games. That’s not so clear or obvious to me rn (I’m also reminded of a 2023 poll that indicated most Americans think “woke” is a positive term and a good thing). I think underestimating the economic/material aspect to Trump’s victory, and reducing his victory to cultural appeals, is flawed analysis (especially given Dems almost won the House and came closeish to keeping the Senate despite toxic political headwinds in the immediate post-pandemic period). The cultural appeals only worked bc of economic pessimism, otherwise those cultural attacks wouldn’t have landed IMO (the “they don’t care about you they only care about other ppl not like you, but I see you and hear you” message).