Pollster Lee Miringoff said in an interview that aired Thursday on Hill.TV that immigration is not a “reelectable issue” for President Trump.
Miringoff said that while Trump is strong on the issue of immigration among his supporters, it likely will not be a strong enough issue to guarantee him a victory in 2020 among most other voters.
“He’s really talking about the refugee issue, and that’s really what he thinks brought him to the White House,” Miringoff, the director of the Marist Poll, told Hill.TV’s Jamal Simmons on “What America’s Thinking.”
“That is not the issue that you want to be closing the government down and building the wall around, and all that,” he said. “That’s not reelectable issue for him.”
Miringoff cautioned that Trump was “sort of barking up the wrong tree,” on immigration.
“He’s barking up the base tree, but that’s really not going to help him ultimately in terms of the Electoral College,” he said.
Trump campaigned on the promise to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border during the 2016 presidential election.
The president sought to fulfill his signature campaign promise late last year amid a standoff with Congress over billions of dollars in border wall funding. The standoff resulted in a weeks-long partial government shutdown that ended without securing money for a border wall.
Trump later declared a national emergency as a means of bypassing Congress to secure wall funding.
A Politico-Morning Consult poll released earlier last week found that 52 percent of all voters surveyed said they are against Trump’s emergency declaration.
Eighty percent of Republicans surveyed said they favor the declaration, according to the poll.
— Julia Manchester
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