CNN’s resident numbers guru has laid out just how badly President Donald Trump is hemorrhaging with immigrant voters who helped power his 2024 comeback.
The network’s data reporter Harry Enten walked viewers through the damage live on Tuesday morning on News Central, after anchor Kate Bolduan noted that naturalized citizens casting ballots helped Trump win the White House in 2024 but that the latest polls show he has lost most of their support.
“Look at this now. Minus 46 points falling through the floor. My goodness gracious, that’s a shift of 44 points away from the President of the United States amongst a group that he did historically well with for a Republican presidential candidate. Voters are waving adios amigos goodbye to the President of the United States,” Enten said.
In late 2024, he noted, Trump’s net approval among immigrant voters was “pretty gosh darn good for a Republican president.” Those gains, Enten said, “are basically collapsing.”
“It turns out that actions do in fact have consequences,” he said.
The biggest consequence, Enten argued, is Trump’s deportation push. Back in 2024, voters trusted Trump more than Kamala Harris on immigration policy by four points. Now, Enten said, 60 percent of immigrant voters say Trump has gone too far on deportations. He said they thought they were “signing up for one thing and what they got was something very, very different.”
“They did not want what they see as the harshness of the Trump deportation policies,” Enten said.
He added that the cost of living is also driving the slide, and that Trump is now back at levels “he might have been used to seeing during term number one.”
The slide could hurt Republicans well beyond the White House. “President Trump, as much as he wishes, is not on the ballot in a month,” Enten said. “Who is on the ballot is Republicans running for Congress.”
Among immigrant voters, Democrats now lead by 22 points on the generic congressional ballot, Enten said, a shift of 18 points away from the Republican Party. In 2024, Trump lost the group to Harris by only four points, so the Democratic lead is now more than five times as big.
Immigrants make up about 10 percent of voters, Enten said, “a significant chunk.” If Republicans can’t keep them, he said, “it’s just yet another group that they haven’t been able to hold onto that Donald Trump made big gains with back in 2024.”
Trump spent his 2024 campaign promising to lower prices after inflation hit a 40-year high during former President Joe Biden’s second year in office.
