Trump’s Immigration Executive Order Not Unpopular

So 59 percent of respondents are either in favor of the executive order, indifferent, or don’t know anything about it. It’s tiresome to keep harping on media bias, but given that’s the top line result of the poll, here’s the headline Reuters is running with: “Exclusive: Only a third of Americans think Trump’s travel ban will make them safer.” Considering 26 percent of respondents said that the executive order would make them “less safe,” and the rest had no opinion, that headline seems designed to attack Trump’s executive order even if it means downplaying the results of Reuters’s own poll.

It’s also remarkable that the executive order is still relatively popular after a weekend of protests, some successful legal actions challenging the order, and loads of negative press. Even a lot of conservative critics and Republican members of Congress, who might otherwise have supported the executive order, expressed concerns about the incompetence involved in implementing it. Had the implementation been more considered and gone more smoothly, it’s hard to imagine that the executive order wouldn’t be more popular.

Some conservatives, like John Podhoretz, have been warning not to dismiss the intensity of the Trump opposition as a political force. I think this is correct. There were a lot of dismissals of the Tea Party in 2010, and congressional elections that year resulted in the worst electoral defeat for a major party since the end of World War II. And that was with a media that was hostile to the Tea Party—this time around they’re putting pink hats on the cover of Time magazine and talking about “the resistance.”

However, there’s an equal and opposite danger for Democrats. One is to mistake the fact that Trump is hated in their respective Facebook bubbles for the fact that he and his policies are broadly unpopular when he’s not. This is a rather illuminating way of looking at the Reuters poll on Trump’s executive order:

Further, the chaos involved in Trumpland is not a new thing. Every time Trump does something outrageous, the temptation has been to declare that this new action will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back of Trump’s support. And yet, despite a number of decisions and statements during the campaign that would have sunk a normal candidate, Trump marched right on to the White House. As The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer recently remarked, “Liberals really need to be careful about constructing their own echo chamber where the Trump White House is always on the verge of implosion.” MSNBC host Chris Hayes enthusiastically agreed with the sentiment.

Funnily enough, the Obama presidency was marked by the media rushing to call everything the GOP did to oppose the Democratic agenda “Republican overreach”, and the term was comically overused, considering how the GOP dominated state, local, and federal elections as Obama’s two terms wore on. The press is not exactly eager to let go of this phrase—Serwer’s own publication ran a piece on January 3 entitled, “Republicans Grapple With the Risk of Overreach.”

But as the furor over Trump’s executive order shows, the risk of Democratic overreach is very real—particularly because outraged liberals are storming Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer’s apartment and demanding he engage the Democratic party in unprecedented amounts of obstructionism over basic things such as cabinet appointments. In general, the base is pushing the party much further left than they ought to be in a country that, despite all of Barack Obama’s “coalition of the ascendent” triumphalism, is still firmly center-right. It’s possible that Trump might well implode all on his own, and fierce Democratic opposition early could pay off. However, 10 Democratic senators are up for reelection in 2018 in states that Trump won. If Trump remains at all popular in those states by the time the midterms roll around, the minority party runs the risk of even further reducing its congressional power.

In other words, when even smart liberals such as Serwer and Hayes are sounding the alarm, Democrats are indeed running a big risk of overreach.