When Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross shot Minnesota resident and mother of three Renee Good in the head last week, Republicans immediately declared that Americans would overwhelmingly support the killing. Little of the footage had been verified at that point, some hadn’t even be released, and no one, of course, had any way of telling how the public would react. But this was never a credible prediction so much as a cynical attempt to create a self-fulfilling prophecy: if Americans were told that Americans supported the killing, maybe Americans would support it.
Thus we got messages like this from Republican pundit Sohrab Ahmari:
Because there are actually lots of good people on the Left with whom I agree on various things, I feel compelled to say: Guys, this is one of those instances where you’re going all in on a case that’s 70-30 (at best) against you. (Feel free to dismiss this.)
In the days that immediately followed, various pundits attempted to extrapolate from some past polling (and a tangential snap poll by YouGov) how Americans would actually react. But now that a week has passed, we know. And it’s not looking good for ICE:
By an average margin of more than 22 points, Americans overwhelmingly find that ICE’s killing of Renee Good was unjustified (a scenario we traditionally describe as “murder”). Republicans weren’t just wrong in predicting a landslide of support for ICE; the landslide went in the exact opposite direction. Ahmari’s prediction was wrong by a hilarious margin of 62 points, a failure that should permanently discredit his media branding as a post-partisan populist who’s in touch with the American people.
And as bad as these numbers are, the details are even worse. Just look at the crosstabs:
Aside from the predictable partisan and ideological splits, pollsters have yet to find a demographic where this killing has majority support. Even among white Americans — who are historically much more…
Auteur: Carl Beijer
