“83 academic articles on polling methodology”

How to lose elections and alienate friends

In a comprehensive report for the Atlantic this week, titled, Why Democrats Got the Politics of Immigration So Wrong for So Long, Rogé Karma describes how progressive activists and immigration advocacy groups convinced party leaders to embrace deeply unpopular stances on immigration. Largely, their advice was premised on the idea that such stances would build up their vote share with Latinos—something it manifestly failed to do. The influence of these groups, Karma writes, “can be seen in the focus of Hillary Clinton’s campaign on immigration and diversity in 2016, the party’s near-universal embrace of border decriminalization in 2020, and the Biden administration’s hesitance to crack down on the border until late in his presidency.” Karma makes a plausible case, citing exit poll data showing displeasure with the party’s approach to immigration ranking among the top reasons why voters rejected Kamala Harris this year, that a different approach to the issue “might very well have made the difference in 2016 and 2024. It could therefore rank among the costliest blunders the Democratic Party has ever made.”

I am no expert on immigration policy, and my goal here is not to litigate Karma’s argument about the party’s political calculus on the issue. Instead I want to draw attention to what might seem like a side issue in the article: namely, the picture it paints of the intellectual culture that prevailed in Democratic circles during this period. One of the main protagonists of the piece is a pollster and UCLA political science professor named Matt Barreto, who is said to have exerted major influence on the party’s immigration positioning from the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2015 onward. Barreto’s firm, Latino Decisions, established its reputation by claiming that other polling firms did not conduct enough interviews in Spanish, and therefore were not properly bullish about the surge of Latino votes that would result from the party adopting a more permissive immigration policy. There were many dissenters to this view, including among mainstream polling companies like Pew, who are quoted in the piece as questioning both Barreto’s findings and his methodology. But when Karma confronts Barreto with these criticisms, Barreto “dismisses” them. What gives him the confidence for this dismissal?

“Most of these other pollsters haven’t published 83 academic articles on polling methodology and don’t have Ph.D.s,” he told me. “I would invite them to attend the graduate seminar I teach on the subject.”

I’m always surprised when academics let themselves be heard saying things like this, perhaps less by the arrogance than by the lack of embarrassment. It tells you something about the social and intellectual world someone must inhabit when they consider it acceptable to respond to criticism this way even in semi-public settings, much less to a reporter for a national magazine. Barreto works in a field, moreover, whose (unfortunately) elevated standing with left-liberal policymakers is based entirely on the idea that it is a “science,” and yet his attitude here could not be more anti-scientific. When he encounters confounding research, he is not moved to reexamine his own findings but rather to invite those who conducted it to his lecture, where they will presumably learn the error of their ways.

Beyond the depressing things it reveals about the culture of academia, the quote and ensuing story tell us something about the stultified world in which policy debates seem to have occurred during the 2010s. The frame for this article is that Democrats got the “politics of immigration” wrong, and this framing is reflected in quotations by some pollsters and activists who now admit, in the wake of the 2024 election, that they need to rethink their strategy. “It’s imperative that the immigration movement comes together to reflect about the path forward and the kinds of policies that are realistic in the near term for our community,” Vanessa Cárdenas, the executive director of the immigration-reform nonprofit America’s Voice, tells Karma. But the way that Barreto responds here to perfectly reasonable disagreement about public opinion data is not unrelated to the difficulty that progressives have had these past several years “reflecting” on anything at all. So is the way he seems to have bullied other groups out of influence by claiming that his firm alone had access to “authentic” Latino sentiment—a claim that turned out to be utterly false.

The issue is not limited to Democratic party politics, or to the topic of immigration. So much of the discourse that spanned across left-liberal academia, publishing, and political culture in the 2010s was paralyzed by the combination of identitarian blackmail and technocratic credentialism that Barreto marshals so succinctly when his research is challenged. At The Point, we tended to emphasize the way that these rhetorical tactics compromised our intellectual life, but the Atlantic article offers just one example of how they can now be seen to have backfired even on their own, narrowly political terms. The inability to conduct open discussions about how to approach difficult issues—in many cases, the refusal to even countenance the fact that the issues were difficult—has had long-term political consequences that should be counted as disastrous by those who are most invested in seeing progressive policy solutions to them. If Barreto thought his ability to shut out competing research would lead to a more humane immigration policy in America, he was clearly mistaken. But this result, as the article attests, was not difficult to predict. To appreciate it properly, what was needed was not an eighty-fourth academic article on polling methodology but, rather, a space for dialogue between those with different data points, perspectives and experiences, and absent appeals to pre-existing ideological prejudices or unearned authority (whether ethnic, or technocratic). Yet it was precisely these kinds of spaces that were being hyperpoliticized in those years, often triumphantly, by academics and intellectuals no less than by political consultants and pollsters like Barreto.

The Point does not do polling, mercifully, but we did try during the first Trump term to offer a wider range of opinions and perspectives on immigration than one was able to find in mainstream publications, and certainly in the party platforms of the Democrats. Below are a few (non-academic) articles that seem worth sharing today. Perhaps they will be helpful to those hoping to genuinely “reflect” on the issue in the coming years.

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From the archive

Timothy Crimmins, Stretching The Veil (2019)

“Having struggled to make sense of immigration within the confines of his system, John Rawls was not so much thinking through the issue as availing himself of an existing body of thought. A diverse group of American writers and activists had been talking about immigration in terms of population management and ‘environmental integrity’ for many years. Now that open-borders activists and environmental groups are no longer enemies it is worth revisiting this history—for their convergence over the past couple of decades illuminates the central political question of our time.”

Michael Kochin, A Country Is a Country (2017)

“To quote Donald Trump, ‘A country is a country.’ To think about America, our country, we have to think about what a country is, abstracting from the history, culture, geography and ethnography of any particular country. What is it to live together in a country? A country is a place, inhabited by a people. Those inhabitants have an attachment to a place and its people that goes beyond or stands alongside their desire to form and fulfill their own purposes. They see their fellow inhabitants as something more than guests in the same hotel. They want to succeed in their purposes, but they also want to have their success recognized by people whose recognition they value.”

José Ángel Navejas, Negative Growth (2017)

“Economists sometimes use the term ‘negative growth,’ to describe a country’s contracting economy. When this happens in the U.S., it is not uncommon to blame the problem on the undocumented. Cast as the negative growth of the nation, we have come to be regarded as a disease, an unwelcome presence that must be removed immediately, like a cancer. This signals another kind of negative growth: a contraction of America’s promise to welcome the tired, huddled masses.”