As we dive deeper and deeper into the longest government shutdown in history, the media’s focus on the border wall only grows. They tried to steer away for a moment with the Buzzfeed report on Trump and Cohen, and we all saw how that ended. It seems the only thing left for mainstream media is to try and support the losing Democratic position that the border wall is evil. It’s just a matter of time before they lose footing and the entire argument collapses. Trump is going to get progress on the wall. You can trust in that.
In the meantime, he has proven yet again that if he gives Democrats and the mainstream media enough rope, they’ll continue to hang themselves. That happened in the form of a new poll that they are desperately trying to hide.
The Narrative
You’ve heard this enough times that we could all chant it together out loud. Donald Trump is a racist, and all of his policy is racist. In fact, he’s pure evil. Since his policy is racist, his call for a wall must also be racist. We could even say that walls in general are immoral (thanks for that gem Nancy Pelosi).
Since Trump is so bad, it’s obvious that anyone who has a race should be anti-Trump. In the case of the border wall, it’s clearly racism at Latinos. According to lamestream media outlets, all Latinos are a part of a single voting monolith. They hate Trump and will never support him. They also hate his border wall and would never support it. After all, every Latino in this country is clearly an immigrant and must be pro-immigration in every form.
That’s a pretty succinct summary of what you’re being told. Does it resemble any measure of truth?
A Pair of Polls
At the end of November, PBS ran a poll to check Trump’s approval rating. Remember that this was before the shutdown began. There were plenty of breakdowns of demographics and such. The number we care about for this particular discussion is the Latino approval rating. As of the closing of that poll, December 4, Latinos showed a 65-percent disapproval rating of Trump. Only 31 percent approved, and the rest were uncertain.
PBS repeated the same poll from January 10 to the 13. In the second poll (during the shutdown), Latinos measured a 50-percent approval rating and a 46-percent disapproval. That’s a huge swing. It also correlates with huge coverage of the border wall dispute that blames Trump for everything.
Keep in mind that this is a PBS poll. It’s not exactly biased in favor of conservatism. If we can believe these numbers, they paint a wholly different view of voter opinion right now.
Correcting the Narrative
We can’t prove that the approval swing is solely because Trump is fighting for a border wall. In the time between the two polls, we saw a pair of extremely positive job reports. We also saw China come closer and closer to a trade deal. It’s possible that the approval is largely economic.
That said, it’s hard to support the idea that those polled are unaware of the dispute over funding a border wall. It suggests that the majority of Latinos in America are not in favor of open borders. If you consider that Latinos disproportionately live in border regions in our country, it makes a stronger case. The people who are most directly impacted by border policy seem to favor the wall more than not. To stress the point, they favor the wall enough that it reversed their opinion of Trump in a matter of weeks.
Now, we have to acknowledge that PBS’s polling is not always the most reliable. That said, PBS certainly believed in the veracity of these numbers enough to try and hide the results. They buried the poll deeply, and it was only through investigative journalism from yours truly that the numbers were brought to light. If PBS fears these numbers, we might be able to take them a little more seriously.
This is not a small statement. The idea that Latinos living on the border are largely in favor of more border security says a lot. Mostly, it says that the liberals are full of it. It also emphasizes the fact that Trump is doing right by America. It also proves that the border wall isn’t racist, unless the Democrats’ next move is to claim that 50 percent of Latinos in America are racist — against other Latinos. That would certainly be entertaining to watch.
