Yahoo News/YouGov border poll: Voters say Trump would do a ‘better job’ on immigration — but they prefer Harris’s plans

More voters continue to believe that former President Donald Trump would do a better job handling immigration (51%) than Vice President Kamala Harris (38%), according to a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll.

But when asked about specific immigration policies, the same voters tend to prefer Harris’s plans over Trump’s.

The survey of 1,714 U.S. adults, which was conducted from Oct. 2 to Oct. 4, offers a revealing look at America’s complex and often contradictory views on one of the key issues of the 2024 contest.

Immigration is front and center this week as the battleground border state of Arizona hosts competing campaign rallies with Harris, Trump and both of their running mates. Late last month, Harris traveled to the southern border for the first time since June 2021 to unveil her immigration agenda. Trump, meanwhile, has increasingly focused his stump speeches on false claims about migrants — that they have criminal records; that they’re eating pets; that they could start "World War III.”

On Friday, the Republican nominee will visit the mostly Democratic town of Aurora, Colo., where he plans to claim — again, falsely — that Venezuelan migrants "are taking over the town, taking over buildings ... they're destroying our country."

The new Yahoo News/YouGov poll suggests that while Trump’s apocalyptic vision is connecting with his existing base, it is less appealing to voters as a whole — and particularly to independents — than Harris’s more nuanced perspective.

Comparing Trump's and Harris’s plans for 2025 and beyond

To test this idea, respondents were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the following unattributed statements:

• “It’s a massive invasion at our southern border that has spread misery, crime, poverty, disease and destruction to communities all across our land.”

• “I reject the false choice that suggests we must choose either between securing our border and creating a system that is orderly, safe and humane. We can and we must do both.”

The first quote came from Trump’s Republican National Convention speech in July; the second came from Harris’s September border visit.

A slim majority of registered voters (51%) agree with Trump’s unattributed statement, including 51% of independents. The bulk of that support, however, comes from voters who lean Republican (86%) and/or cast their ballots for Trump in 2020 (87%).

In contrast, nearly three-quarters of registered voters (73%) agree with Harris’s unattributed statement, including two-thirds of independents (66%).

This pattern — more consensus around Harris’s immigration approach than Trump’s — shapes public opinion on specific policies as well.

The new Yahoo News/YouGov poll asked about three items at the heart of Trump’s second-term immigration agenda. Two of them are supported by less than half of registered voters: “rounding up, detaining and expelling millions of undocumented immigrants” (49%) and “moving thousands of American troops currently stationed overseas to the U.S.- Mexico border” (37%). The third — “building a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border” — barely receives majority support (52%).

Broadly speaking, Harris’s plan — which involves working toward comprehensive immigration reform while reviving the bipartisan border-security deal hammered out earlier this year in the Senate — is more popular.

Of Harris’s proposals, “providing a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants already in the U.S.” garners the least support among registered voters (51%). But it’s still on par with the most popular part of Trump’s plan (building a border wall).

Meanwhile, the rest of Harris’s agenda (drawn from the border deal) scores higher: “making it easier to expel migrants from the U.S.” (55%); “raising the requirements for immigrants to receive political asylum” (56%); “automatically shuttering the border if illegal crossings reach a certain average daily threshold” (61%); “hiring more asylum officers and border security agents” (76%).

All four of Harris’s border-security policies, it’s worth noting, are far more popular with Republican respondents than with their Democratic counterparts. They’re also more popular with voters who lean Republican — by margins of 16 to 26 percentage points — than Trump’s plan to send U.S. troops to the border.

Why Trump still leads on immigration

So why is Harris less trusted than Trump on immigration? In part it’s because of these partisan dynamics. Democrats aren’t particularly enthusiastic about Harris’s embrace of stricter border-security measures, and Republicans will oppose her on the issue no matter what.

To test this effect, Yahoo News and YouGov split respondents into two groups when asking about the border deal. Struck in January by Senate negotiators, it actually gave the GOP much of what it had asked for. But Trump balked — and following his lead, Republicans on Capitol Hill effectively doomed the legislation.

For the poll, one group of respondents read a description of the border deal that didn’t mention Trump or Harris. The second group read the same description followed by the sentence “but Donald Trump opposed the deal and it died in the Senate; Kamala Harris wants to sign it into law if elected president.”

Among the voters who weren’t told about Trump’s opposition and Harris’s support, there was broad agreement: a full 60% favored a “$20 billion bipartisan border deal” struck by “a group of Republican and Democratic senators” that would “raise the bar for asylum, hire more asylum officers and border security agents, make it easier to expel migrants and automatically close the border if illegal crossings reach a certain average daily threshold.” Just 20% opposed it.

But among the voters who were told about Trump’s opposition and Harris’s support, the number of voters who favored the deal declined (to 46%) while the number who objected to it shot up (to 29%).

Why? Because a modest increase in the margin of support among voters who lean Democratic — from 65% to 17% to 71% to 9% — wasn’t nearly enough to offset a total reversal among voters who lean Republican. After learning that Trump blocked the border-security deal and that Harris wants to bring it back, GOP leaners went from favoring the package by 34 points (59% to 25%) to opposing it by 32 points (19% to 51%).

In other words, Harris might have the more popular plan on paper. But politics doesn’t play out on paper.

Possible bright spots for Harris

The vice president is also suffering from the Biden administration’s broader record on immigration. After Biden took office in 2021 and reversed some of Trump’s hard-line restrictions, illegal crossings surged to a record high of more than 2 million per year, on average. Since then, Trump and other Republicans have seized on Harris’s diplomatic role addressing the root causes of Central American migration to falsely claim that she is actually America’s “border czar” — and therefore to blame for the situation as a whole.

As a result, a majority of voters (55%) now say Harris deserves most (39%) or some (16%) of the blame for the border situation. Just 42% say Trump deserves most (27%) or some (15%) of the blame.

Yet the new Yahoo News/YouGov survey suggests Harris might have more room for improvement on immigration than her boss. Despite the “border czar” line of attack, for instance, fewer voters blame her for the situation at the border (again, 55%) than blamed Biden (64%) the last time the question was asked in March. Fewer voters now say the border is in a “state of crisis” (43%) than said the same in March (51%) — possibly reflecting the fact that the numbers of crossings and asylum seekers have recently plummeted.

And while 52% of voters say the border situation has gotten worse overall in the years since Biden took office, significantly fewer say it’s still getting worse today (34%). A majority say things have stayed the same (32%) or even gotten better (22%) “in recent months.”

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The Yahoo News survey was conducted by YouGov using a nationally representative sample of 1,714 U.S. adults interviewed online from Oct. 2 to 4, 2024. The sample was weighted according to gender, age, race, education, 2020 election turnout and presidential vote, baseline party identification and current voter registration status. Demographic weighting targets come from the 2019 American Community Survey. Baseline party identification is the respondent’s most recent answer given prior to Nov. 1, 2022, and is weighted to the estimated distribution at that time (33% Democratic, 27% Republican). Respondents were selected from YouGov’s opt-in panel to be representative of all U.S. adults. The margin of error is approximately 2.9%.