Politics

The GOP is losing one of its best issues

Published

5 months ago

January 29, 2026

For years, Republicans have had some reliable terra firma: If they were talking about immigration and border security, they were winning.

Even amid the backlash from Donald Trump’s 2016 pledge to ban all Muslim immigrants to his 2024 amplification of baseless claims that migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets—immigration remained a durable, winning issue for the GOP.

Now the ground is shifting under them.

A torrent of viral images from Minnesota and beyond as Trump’s immigration agents stepped up their shambolic interior campaign of enforcement in recent months — and the killing of two people in Minneapolis in two separate incidents this past month — have led to a loud public backlash, soured voters on the GOP’s approach and eroded President Donald Trump’s standing on the issue ahead of the looming midterms.

The broad sweep of public polling shows Trump fumbling what has historically been his party’s strongest issue, which even Democrats concede paved his path back to the White House. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found this week Trump hit a second-term trough on the issue, with a majority of Americans — 58 percent — saying his crackdown has gone too far. Only 39 percent approve of his handling of immigration, down two points from earlier this month, and an 11-point erosion from last February. What’s more, a poll from the Democratic-aligned Searchlight Institute this week found that 58 percent of likely midterm voters want ICE to be reined in.

“The image that has been created is not a good thing,” said Jose Arango, the Republican chair of Hudson County, New Jersey, a heavily Democratic area with a large Hispanic population that shifted rightward in 2024. “We’re losing in the public relations campaign.”

Even before Alex Pretti’s killing in Minneapolis, Trump’s own voters were fretting over his agenda. A plurality of Americans said the president’s mass deportation campaign is too aggressive — including 1 in 5 voters who backed Trump in 2024, according to the latest POLITICO Poll. More than 1 in 3 Trump voters said that while they support his immigration agenda, they disapprove of the way he is implementing it.

And another new round of polling on Thursday could give Democrats more ammo as voters move away from Trump’s immigration agenda. The Democratic-aligned Senate Majority PAC’s latest polling, shared exclusively with Blue Light News and being sent to lawmakers, donors and campaigns Thursday, shows not only a growing number of likely voters who disapprove of ICE, but also a majority in favor of Democrats’ strategy of demands for reform even if it means a partial government shutdown, with 54 percent also saying they would blame the GOP and Trump for the shutdown and not accepting ICE reforms. These numbers are especially telling as the biggest shifts occur “among moderates, non-MAGA Republicans, and key swing voters,” the polling memo said.

As former President Joe Biden and his administration officials left themselves electorally exposed on the issue, then-candidate Donald Trump exploited those vulnerabilities with vows to seal the southern border and enact the largest deportation campaign in American history. But his enforcement actions have focused less on the border, which polls show most voters approve of, and more on the nation’s interior, drawing the ire of Trump-curious commentators like the comedian and podcaster Joe Rogan and raising alarm among Republicans.

“The president can feel, generally, that his policies at the border have been largely supported by a majority of Americans. But what he’s doing inside the border seems to be not working,” said Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt, a Republican who runs one of the most conservative large cities in the nation but backed Kamala Harris in 2024.

One longtime Republican strategist who worked on presidential campaigns in 2020 and 2024, granted anonymity to candidly assess Republicans’ standing, expressed consternation over ICE’s deployment to a place like Minnesota, far from the southern border.

“When I think of immigrants broadly, I don’t think of Minnesota,” the strategist said. “People want to see, like, okay, ‘I voted for taking criminal illegal immigrants and getting them out of the country. I want to see criminal illegal immigrants taken out of the country. I want to see more miles of wall being built.’ I feel like we talked about the wall weekly in Trump 1. I don’t remember the last time we talked about the wall in Trump 2.”

All of which raises an uncomfortable question for Republicans: Is the party in danger of ceding one of its best issues back to Democrats?

“Immigration used to be a winning issue for Democrats back when we made clear we took enforcement seriously,” said Adam Jentleson, the former chief of staff to Sen. John Fetterman (D-Penn.) and top aide to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who commissioned the Searchlight polling shared with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer as he shuttled toward another potential shutdown over the issue. “It can be a winning issue for us again if we are smart about how we handle this.

Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), a rising Democratic star who won his seat in 2024 at the same time Trump carried his state, campaigned in key Latino areas for his party in New Jersey, Virginia and Miami’s mayoral elections last year, and who has launched his own border security and immigration platform, told Blue Light News his party has to build trust with swing voters.

“We have to be the party that talks about professional, legal enforcement of our immigration laws with an understanding that criminals need to be deported and the border needs to be secure, and that we have to move to a sane compromise when it comes to immigration reform,” Gallego said.

It wasn’t so long ago that was the reality: As recently as 2013, under then-President Barack Obama, the majority of Americans said the Democratic Party better represents their feelings on immigration than Republicans did.

What does the GOP risk ahead of the midterms if it doesn’t find a better message?

“I think you’ll see the numbers continue to suffer,” the longtime GOP strategist said.

Gallego, who has called for White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller to be fired, said that gives Democrats an opportunity.

“If I was the Republicans right now, I would be very worried about what the future looks like in terms of elections, and Stephen Miller may have basically created a political tsunami among voters, both Latino voters as well as just kind of moderate voters,” Gallego said. “That’s going to come back and haunt them, going into the 2026 election.”

Alec Hernández, Lisa Kashinsky and Ali Bianco contributed to this report.

Politics

Iran set to progress at World Cup

Published

20 minutes ago

June 27, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Iran’s adventure through a World Cup beset by geopolitical complexity and logistical complications will likely continue after the team landed a frenetic 1-1 draw against Egypt. The high-stakes encounter kicked off hours after a tenuous peace between Washington and Tehran was threatened by American strikes on Iranian military installations along the Strait of Hormuz. Read the full story from Seattle by Sasha Issenberg and Sophia Cai here.

Politics

The “Pride Match” that wasn’t

Published

2 hours ago

June 27, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

SEATTLE — As a lesbian who was born in Egypt, Noha Mahgoub could have chosen to dress for what local organizers branded a “Pride Match” in colors associated with either her sexual orientation or her country of origin. The 43-year-old Democratic legislative aide — one of the top staffers in Washington state government — chose the latter, arriving in a red Egyptian national team jersey, a black hat emblazoned with YALLA and red-white-and-black tricolor facepaint.

“I’ve seen Pride shirts, I’ve seen Pride face paintings,” she observed from a concourse minutes before national anthems began echoing around Lumen Field. “It’s been really great, but I’m seeing a lot more Egypt and Iran and people cheering for their countries and singing their songs.”

Indeed, despite FIFA’s announcement that rainbow flags would be permitted in the stadium, few were visible as the match began. Instead, the stands rippled with the colors of the two Middle Eastern countries on the field, including many of the pre-revolutionary lion-and-sun flags that FIFA has attempted to ban under a stadium code of conduct that prohibits political displays.

Mahgoub had seen Egypt’s national team in person only once before, as a child while the team was angling to qualify for the 1990 World Cup. Since then, Mahgoub and her family relocated to Washington state, where she said the local Egyptian-American community has become enlivened by new arrivals coming to work at Seattle-based tech companies.

“You know how it is, you start calling everybody your cousins — a lot of cousins that I wasn’t related to,” Mahgoub said. “Well, I think a lot of them are here.”

Politics

Why Belgium’s prime minister isn’t cheering on the Red Devils

Published

5 hours ago

June 27, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Ah, Belgium. The country of fries, chocolate, Kevin De Bruyne and, some might say, chronic political division.

Beyond Brussels, a mighty international melting pot, the country is split between Dutch-speaking Flanders, French-speaking Wallonia and a small German-speaking community. Those linguistic divisions are mirrored in its politics: Belgium has separate party systems on either side of the language border, as well as a highly devolved federal structure that gives significant powers to its regions.

Today, Belgian politics is as fragmented as ever. It took 234 days to form a federal government after the June 2024 election (yes, you read that right). The delay was driven largely by the fact that no camp came close to winning a majority, forcing months of negotiations between parties with sharply different ideological and linguistic bases.

Flemish nationalism has also become a growing force, shaped by two right-wing nationalist parties: the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA), which wants to transform Belgium into a looser confederal state and ultimately give Flanders far greater autonomy, and the far-right Vlaams Belang, which openly campaigns for Flemish independence.

So, you might think the 2026 World Cup would offer Belgium’s leader a rare opportunity to rally and unify the country behind a shared national symbol, right?

Wrong.

Prime Minister Bart De Wever, who hails from the N-VA party, has expressed almost no public support for the Red Devils, Belgium’s national soccer team.

That contrasts with leaders in nearby countries that also qualified for the World Cup. The leaders of the Netherlands, Germany and France have all publicly backed their squads, whether on social media or through public appearances.

The reason may be simple: De Wever just doesn’t care for the sport.

A Belgian official told Blue Light News: “The prime minister is not a soccer fan, so he doesn’t seek to project that image publicly. To do otherwise would not be authentic.”

Flemish media have indeed reported that the prime minister has little interest in soccer. In a podcast appearance a few years ago, he said the sight of people “going totally crazy in a group in the stands” left him feeling “ice cold.”

But politics is likely part of the story too. De Wever has led the Flemish nationalist N-VA since 2004. Throughout his political career, he has argued that Flanders should have far greater autonomy and that Belgium should evolve into a confederal state. For a politician with that background, overt displays of Belgian national unity probably don’t come naturally, and in fact contradict emphasis on Flemish autonomy.

This is not the first time the N-VA’s relationship with the Red Devils has attracted attention. In 2015, after Belgium reached No. 1 in the FIFA world rankings, Francophone Socialist Party leader Laurette Onkelinx asked the Chamber of Representatives to applaud the team. All parties joined in, except the N-VA.

During Euro 2016, the N-VA had to deny it instructed ministers and MPs to avoid publicly celebrating the Red Devils so as not to appear too Belgian, after rumors circulated in Belgian media.

One of De Wever’s few comments about this year’s World Cup concerned Belgium’s official tournament song. His complaint: It did not contain a single word of Dutch.

“My staff have confirmed to me that not a single word is sung in Dutch. That is, to put it mildly, not elegant,” he said, in keeping with his ideologies of promoting Flanders, when asked about the song during a parliamentary committee hearing.

Sport is often treated as a vehicle for national unity. In New Zealand, Belgium’s opponent in today’s match, elite teams have successfully woven elements of Māori culture into their sporting traditions, most famously through the prematch haka, which has helped create a shared cultural identity that connects Māori and non-Māori New Zealanders.

In Belgium, however, this World Cup has not yet become that kind of unifying project. At least not from the very top.