Even Mexicans miss Trump after dealing with Biden
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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In general election polling against President Joe Biden, Donald Trump isn’t just increasingly cleaning up in swing states. The former president has a 14-point lead over the incumbent when it specifically comes to immigration, according to a new Harvard-Harris poll, and Mexicans are apparently missing the Republican thanks to his strength on the issue.
“Trump, he started rough,” said Roy Rosales, a Mexican chef in El Paso, Texas, to Politico. “But now that you see it, when Biden came in, he messed everything up.”
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“It’s getting really bad with a lot of the people coming in,” said Daniela Simental, another Mexican immigrant in El Paso. Her husband concurred, “Everything’s gone to s***.”
Simental did not vote for Trump in 2016 but said she now wanted him back in the White House.
Politico’s David Siders tries to gild the situation with caveats for panicked Democrats when he reports from a special election for the city council.
“From what I could tell talking with voters outside polling places that day, immigration simply wasn’t top of mind,” Siders writes. “Even here, where immigration is a local issue, staring city government and voters in the face. People shared opinions if I asked them: ‘Shoot, it’s very overwhelming,’ or ‘It’s out of control,’ or ‘The Democrats … they’ve done a crappy job on the border, horrible job.’ But few people brought the issue up unprompted. They talked about taxes, or inflation, or streetlights or competency at City Hall.”
But of course, Democrats, including Biden, failed on all of those issues on a federal level, as well as a local one. Pollster after pollster has found that the president’s approval rating has fallen to record lows, with his handling of the economy the greatest culprit. That Harvard-Harris poll found that only 39% of voters approve of how Biden has dealt with inflation, which a plurality of 40% of voters consider the single most important issue of the 2024 election.
And how many disagree with the Mexicans surveyed by Politico and actually approve of Biden’s handling of the border? Just 38%, the lowest share of any category and the second most important issue to voters across the board.