Kilmar Abrego Garcia And The Roots Of Public Opinion

How the mass outcry for Garcia's rights, and Donald Trump's collapsing immigration polling, disprove a major Democratic theory.

(Photo by Sen. Van Hollen's Office via Getty Images)

Now we know: Second-term Trump is far from invincible. His approval rating is falling fast. So is the public’s assessment of his approach to the economy, and—perhaps most notably—his approach to immigration.

This isn’t just good news for America. It’s an important moment in a debate that has loomed over Democratic and liberal politics for nearly a decade. One of the longest-running, most consequential disputes over Democratic strategy has abruptly produced an apparent winner.

Readers of this website should be familiar with the divide. On one side are a set of pundits, strategists, and politicians who strongly believe that Democrats have to navigate public opinion as it exists at any given moment. If polls report that voters care most about the economy, then that’s what Democrats should talk about. If a policy polls well, Democrats should support it. And there’s a corollary: If Trump or Republicans poll well on a certain topic, Democrats should avoid that topic as unfavorable terrain.

On the other side is a set of voices who see public opinion as dynamic—shaped around a fluid consensus that follows the voices of leaders and opinion-setters. In this telling, it is folly for Democrats to adhere strictly to polling, which only limits their room to maneuver. Instead, Democrats should seek to create new public narratives—especially by going on the offensive against Trump—even if that means attacking him on issues where he is strong.

I am an adherent of the second approach. But admittedly the polling fundamentalists accumulated some evidence during the 2024 election. Kamala Harris ran a pugilistic campaign, attacking Trump as a fascist, pushing hard to stir up alarm. And while she likely performed better than Joe Biden would have, the results speak for themselves. Harris’s warnings went unheeded.

In recent weeks the debate resurfaced again, centered around Trump’s brutally authoritarian extraordinary renditions, particularly his disappearance of Kilmar Abrego-Garcia into an El Salvadoran dungeon.

The moral outrageousness of this case, and of Trump’s subsequent refusal to free Abrego Garcia—even after his administration admitted Abrego Garcia was wrongly expelled—has gradually moved it to the center of national discourse. Democrats, abandoning habitual caution, have continuously escalated the matter. Their efforts were capped by Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen’s astonishing trip to El Salvador, and equally astonishing success at securing a meeting with Abrego Garcia, which dominated the news for days.

But the polling fundamentalists—writers like Nate Silver and Matt Yglesias—saw disaster in the making. They warned that Trump polled well on immigration, poorly on the economy, and Democrats would be best advised to set aside their moral scruples and simply follow the numbers. Hit Trump where he was weak: tariffs and inflation. Leave Abrego Garcia in obscurity. And some Democratic politicians followed suit, including Gavin Newsom, who described Trump’s deportations as a “distraction” from the economy.

A controversy like this usually goes unresolved, and the respective sides will fight for months or years. But this one has been resolved almost immediately: the polling fundamentalists had it wrong.

Most recent polls show Trump’s approval rating on immigration, far from being fixed, has begun to collapse. One Economist/YouGov poll showed his approval on the issue falling from +6 to -5 in two weeks. Trump’s overall approval rating has also fallen sharply at the same time. Democrats seem to be facing no political penalty for focusing on immigration, and, moreover, they’ve badly wounded Trump on his strongest issue.

The importance of this shift is hard to overstate. It’s proof of concept for dynamic public opinion. We now know, as demonstrable fact, that changing the polls is possible, even when attacking Trump where he’s supposedly strongest.

But why now? What’s different? This isn’t the first time Democrats have hit Trump aggressively, and in the past the public has not always responded. Moreover, Trump has previously seemed to land at a polling floor—roughly 38-40 percent approval—and not budged further.

I would contend that the most likely explanation lies in how Americans get their news. There is a paradoxical quality to modern media, where most stories bounce off, leaving people unaware and unaffected—but every so often, a development breaks through and transforms how Americans see the world. Democrats’ job is to seek out the second kind of story. To do that they need to understand how media has changed.

BREAKING: NEWS

Public opinion can move rapidly in response to events. And it should be obvious that the public learns about events through media consumption. There is simply no other way for most Americans to collect information about national happenings in a brief period.

But which media does the public see? In the past, this was a trivial question. It was expensive to produce and publish news, which meant that there were only a handful of news sources available to each voter, each of which represented a substantial operation. Voters could watch one of a few broadcast channels with enormous audiences and national reach. Or they could subscribe to newspapers, most of which would have hundreds of employees dedicated to covering news in depth. When something happened in the wider world, these outlets would cover it, paying reasonable care to accuracy

That was it. That was all. There was no other practical way to learn about national or international affairs. Everyone tuned into a handful of wavelengths. And so millions of people would hear the same stories, at roughly the same time, and with no alternative sources of mass information. Radicals and conspiracy theorists were limited by the minuscule reach of independent journals, chain letters, and other minor media. Thus, mainstream news narratives were widely shared and generally dominant among the public. If the president was caught in scandal, everyone knew. If the economy was bad, everyone knew.

Today, things are very different. Sources of information have fragmented. Different channels cater to various political leanings. Newspapers have eroded into shadows of their former selves. Most consequentially of all, a huge segment of the public-information ecosystem has moved online, into an endless array of news sites, podcasts, and social-media posts.

I have written about fragmentation before, but it’s worth harping on, because the change is profound and fundamental. No longer does everyone go home and flip on the same channel after dinner. Between TV stations, web sites, podcasts, and social media, each individual audience member assembles a bespoke diet of information. Everyone listens to different sources—sometimes slightly different, sometimes vastly different. This process is probably amplified by the fact that human beings have never spent quite so much time consuming outside media—an average of six hours a day on the internet, half of which is spent on social media, and three hours watching television. We are immersed in information, and—vitally—we choose what to watch and read, from a vast menu of options.

From this torrent of facts and ideas, we populate our minds. This cannot be avoided. Human beings are forced to build their notions of the larger world with secondhand information. It is unlikely you or I will ever meet Donald Trump, travel to Iran, or experience the war in Ukraine. Americans everywhere “know” that Joe Biden presided over a surge of illegal immigration, but most couldn’t intuit that, because most of our communities were untouched and unchanged by it. Many developments are simply too diffuse to be directly experienced—the American employment rate, the shifting climate, the national debt. Our knowledge of these things—mental architecture that any citizen is expected to have—is necessarily constructed not from direct experience, but from what others tell us about them.

And now, more than at any time, what we hear from others depends on who we choose to listen to. We are presented with sources that will tell us Trump is great and brilliant, and sources that tell us he is corrupt and foolish. We have sources that tell us the economy is strong, and sources tell us the economy is weak. Who picks which source to trust? We do, based on our own intuitions, biases, and social influences. And while a great deal of media consumption is non-political, even non-political media has no small share of “ambient” political messages—think about the prevalence of gas-price jokes and memes on Facebook during the Biden administration, or the right-wing lean of some big-name comedians. It’s easy to filter out any message that conflicts with our beliefs and biases: by changing from MSNBC to Fox News, following social-media accounts we find sympathetic or interesting, or relying on sophisticated algorithms, such as TikTok’s, that examine our viewing habits and deliver us material to match.

FACT TOTEMS

One consequence of media fragmentation is that, in an alarmingly tangible way, Americans spend their waking hours living in separate universes with separate facts, tailored to reflect their personal preferences.

And, almost certainly as a result, Americans have proven shockingly impervious to important political realities. The president can build a roaring economy (as under Biden) but most Americans never hear about it, because they have constructed media universes that reflect their latent suspicion of an octogenarian career politician. The president can engage in unprecedented acts of corruption (as under Trump) but a large share of Americans never know or believe it, because they have surrounded themselves with voices that ignore or downplay those scandals.

It’s become cliché to observe that Trump engages constantly in behavior that would have destroyed any previous president. I’d argue that his resilience can be traced to the fact that so many of his supporters live inside a media universe where those misdeeds didn’t happen, or don’t matter. Our self-selected media bubbles act as a political anesthetic, numbing us against new developments by reshaping them to fit the narratives we already believe.

Making matters worse, the conservative segment of American voters largely exists within a media bubble where individual sources are linked to the Republican Party and its leaders. The American right has cultivated a massive network of media outlets and personalities, ranging from entire TV channels and social-media networks to individual small-time influencers, which reliably advance the party line. While right-leaning voters are still engaged in the basic process of building their media diet from a menu, a huge number of options on that menu are directly or indirectly linked to the GOP. This has armed the GOP with a national rage machine that it can toggle on or off at will, by introducing demagogic ideas into their captive media ecosystem and watching as those ideas quickly envelop millions of people who exist within it.

America’s information problem has no clear solution. Democrats and liberals can seek to emulate the right and build captive outlets and sources of their own, but this process takes time. Audiences are, after all, choosing their influencers, which means those audiences must be built organically. More pessimistically, the basic problem of fragmentation has no obvious answer. Liberal voices will always struggle to make inroads into conservative audiences, because those audiences will simply opt to listen to someone else.

Media fragmentation itself seems impossible to stop, because it represents underlying economic realities. In the past, publishing to a national audience cost tens of millions of dollars a year; today, it can be accomplished with a smartphone. As the cost of publication plummets it seems almost inevitable that a vast assemblage of new media will crop up, effectively forcing audiences to select the sources they find most resonant. At this point, it is hard to see how one prevents the long-term retreat of viewers and readers into whatever informational bubbles they find politically and emotionally affirming.

CRISIS ACTING

But the information ecosystem does not completely paralyze our politics, as the Abrego Garcia affair shows. In certain circumstances, the fragmented information environment abruptly consolidates, and starts broadcasting the same thing across many channels at once.

The mental metaphor I use is a giant room, full of a thousand TV news correspondents, reporting on many different topics, cameras facing every which way. If you could see all the broadcasts simultaneously, it would be a thousand screens blaring a thousand things—white noise. Even if every person in the country was watching one of those channels, it would have no discernible impact on what the public at large thinks or feels, as any two people would likely be hearing totally different messages.

But then something dramatic happens—a crisis, a disaster, a conflict. A fire breaks out in the room, or two people start fighting. Suddenly all the cameras turn and face the object of interest. And abruptly, everyone tuned into any of these channels is hearing about the same thing. The subject becomes unavoidable. The chaotic system has spontaneously developed order, driven by the inherent interest in a particularly newsworthy event. Suddenly the scale of this news ecosystem matters—it becomes a mechanism for the efficient, immediate dissemination of information to millions.

With that analogy in mind, it’s easy to reconceive past events. During Biden’s presidency, the chaos of the Afghanistan withdrawal attracted immense media attention, and for several weeks, anyone who flipped on a screen of any sort was likely to see something about the subject. Nominally, his choice to withdraw was popular. Yet Biden’s approval rating plummeted, never to recover.

There were similar moments throughout Trump’s first administration—the Charlottesville demonstrations, the failed GOP attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the Kavanaugh confirmation. All garnered intense interest, with most or all new outlets, and a great deal of social media, intensely focused on the ongoing conflict. Most notably of all, COVID and the George Floyd demonstrations consumed all media at every level for months.

And each of these moments seemed to swing public opinion. Trump was pushed to polling lows in the wake of the ACA fight and Charlottesville rally. Outrage over George Floyd’s murder drove unprecedented protests, and high—though temporary—support for Black Lives Matter and racial-justice reforms.

Although it is impossible to know precisely which events or subjects will polarize the media ecosystem into this kind of intense focus, there are certain commonalities among the ones that do. Most importantly, they all carry a sense of crisis or conflict. They are stories with unresolved endings: a looming threat or disaster, with the resolution uncertain; a political standoff, with the result genuinely contested. The stakes are heavy, and real. Someone tuning in at the start does not know—cannot know—how things will end. The many nodes of the vast media ecosystem are drawn in by fear, suspense, or curiosity, and that heightened attention transcends the usual information bubbles we all inhabit. Suddenly public opinion becomes malleable, responsive to events, like in the old days.

And so it seems clear that these are the kinds of subjects that Democrats should focus on, if they want to move the public. Democrats cannot easily engineer crises, nor should they want to. But they can identify genuine crises and speak about them as such. The United States faces several crises right now, in the form of impending authoritarianism, a deteriorating economy, and America’s imploding national standing. Democrats should talk about them, with the vehemence and alarm they merit.

And Democrats can certainly set up conflicts. Will Kavanaugh be confirmed? Will the ACA repeal be blocked? Will Abrego Garcia be located? Part of what demanded attention to these matters is that Democrats sincerely contested them, and so did Trump, and the winner was not preselected. The news tuned in because something might happen.

Compare this to Democrats’ feigned budget standoff last month: the drama was entirely pretend, because Democrats decided in advance not to obstruct the Republican spending bill. Or Trump’s rushed impeachment trial after the January 6 riot, which Democrats sped to a foregone conclusion of immediate Senate acquittal. News media, typically savvy to the performance, cover these fake conflicts with a yawn, explaining all the way that the outcome is predetermined. In the end, the most dramatic conflict to rise out of the recent budget battle—and what garnered the most coverage—was the only part of the conflict that was genuine and sincere: between Democratic senators, and their own furious voters.

This approach requires a certain verve. Talking about static issues like the economy risks little. Democrats are simply providing color commentary on a subject of supposed public concern. But there’s little reason for anyone not already paying attention to tune in. By contrast, tilting towards a crisis or conflict takes guts. Nobody knows how it’ll end. It’s possible to fail. It’s possible that facts will change under your feet.

But we know now that it can work. Trump’s collapsing immigration polls prove as much.

Many Democratic strategists and pundits will be tempted to downplay the role Democrats played in this change of fortune. They’ll chalk it up to the unique circumstances of Abrego Garcia’s rendition—it’s not that Trump’s policy is unpopular, it’s that he screwed up its implementation in this instance. They’ll allude to the “thermostat” of public opinion, suggesting movement against Trump was inevitable.

But there can’t be backlash to a story nobody hears. This is hardly the only instance of Trump or Republicans outrageously abusing their power to brutalize immigrants. Would Democrats have fared better or worse in 2024 if more Americans knew that, with Trump’s full support, Texas Republicans drowned a woman and her two children as they tried to cross the Rio Grande? How would the public have reacted if Democrats brought the same righteous anger to that state-sanctioned murder that they’ve brought to Abrego Garcia’s state-sanctioned disappearance? It is not the degree of the crime that differentiates these cases, or the degree of right-wing overreach, but the intensity of the anger in response, and the sense of crisis and conflict it has generated.

By leaping into a hard-fought battle, one with real stakes and an uncertain outcome, with facts and justice on their side, Democrats can effectively reshape the fragmented media ecosystem, traveling back in time to an era where people actually paid attention to politics. And not once during the entire Trump era has the public learned more about the man and liked him better for it. If Democrats fight, people watch, and Trump loses.