Hurricanes Lead to Surge in Voter Concern about Immigration

In my last post, I examined a recent Harvard-Harris poll and noted it revealed that immigration was the second-biggest issue behind inflation on voters’ minds headed into the election, ahead of abortion, healthcare, and jobs. There are two questions from that poll I did not discuss, but they likely show why immigration is such a hot topic now – all due to three disasters (Hurricanes Helene and Milton, and one at the border) and the federal government’s responses thereto. Let me explain.

Before I begin, though, here’s a brief recap: That Harvard-Harris poll of 3,145 registered voters was conducted between October 11 and 13, just about two weeks after Hurricane (and then Tropical Storm) Helene cut a swathe of destruction through Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, and eastern Tennessee. Rural sections of the Appalachians were particularly hard hit.

I’ll return to that destruction, but respondents in that poll were surveyed with the images of devastation still fresh in their minds.

It revealed that 14 percent of registered voters named “immigration” as the single issue that mattered to them personally, trailing only inflation (46 percent) and ahead of abortion (11 percent).

At roughly the same time that poll was being conducted, Fox News was surveying respondents for a poll of its own, which was released on October 16. That one surveyed 1,110 registered voters.

As with the Harvard-Harris poll, it showed that immigration was the second-most important issue for respondents in were deciding how to vote, trailing only the economy.

Some 39 percent of the likely – not just registered – voters polled by Fox News said the economy would be the most important on their minds at the ballot box, and 18 percent stated it was immigration.

Abortion was in third place among likely voters in that poll, at 14 percent, while healthcare took fourth, the most important electoral issue for 8 percent of respondents.

That represented a 1-point rise for immigration over similar Fox News polling conducted a month earlier, and a 2-point decline for abortion. The economy also saw a single point increase over that time.

One month before that, in August, “just” 14 percent of registered voters identified immigration as their single most important electoral issue, tied with abortion for second place.

There are two reasons why I am bringing this up. First, it shows that the Harvard-Harris poll wasn’t an outlier. Second, it indicates that immigration is gaining more traction as an issue with the election nearing.

The Destruction

I live in the piedmont of western North Carolina, just far enough from Helene’s eye to have been spared the worst of the storm’s destruction, but close enough to where its most significant impacts were felt to have first-hand knowledge of the impacts and of locals’ impressions of the government’s response.

Let me just put it this way: the storm was “biblical” as one local emergency official put it and the state and federal response was found to be wanting.

Somewhere in the state capital of Raleigh, they are likely planning historical markers describing the devastation to be erected once there are roads to put them along.

Playing Politics?

Of course, Helene wasn’t the only major hurricane to strike of late. On October 9, Hurricane Milton arrived in Florida near Siesta Key and drove across the Sunshine State, clipping Orlando and exiting on the Atlantic Coast early the next day.

As The Hill reported, Vice President (and Democratic presidential nominee) Kamala Harris got into a spat with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in advance of the storm:

    Harris called DeSantis “selfish” Monday [October 7] amid reports the governor refused to take her call after Hurricane Helene hit his state. The governor, a chief foil of the Biden administration, hit back Tuesday, suggesting the vice president was “trying to parachute in” because she’s the Democratic candidate for the White House.

Not surprisingly, Harvard-Harris asked respondents: “Do you think Kamala Harris responded well to the hurricanes or was she playing politics with the hurricanes?”

Voters were split on the question with half (50 percent) stating that she responded well and the other half (50 percent) believing she was playing politics.

There was a strong partisan lean on the question, with 86 percent of Democratic respondents stating that she responded well and 84 percent of GOP voters asserting that she was playing politics. For their part, 54 percent of Independents saw politics in the response, and 46 percent of the unaligned thought Harris responded appropriately.

FEMA Money for Housing Illegal Immigrants?

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is the federal government’s main disaster relief component, and it received mixed marks from the locals over its response to Helene.

That’s more or less how FEMA gets treated in the immediate aftermath of any emergency or disaster, but the administration didn’t do the agency many favors.

During October 2 remarks in Augusta, Ga., for example, Vice President Harris told affected residents “the federal relief and assistance that we have been providing has included FEMA providing $750 for folks who need immediate needs being met, such as food, baby formula, and the like. And you can apply now”.

That was likely cold comfort to people who had lost everything, and who had no access to electricity or even cellular communications.

FEMA is a component of DHS, and the same day that Harris was in Georgia, the department’s secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, took to the White House rostrum to complain:

    We — we are meeting the immediate needs with the money that we have. We are expecting another hurricane hitting. We do not have the funds. FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the season and what — what is imminent.

That sounded like the secretary was leaving the survivors of Helene in the lurch, and prompted many, both in the media and outside the Beltway Bubble, to assess how the agency was spending its money.

What they discovered was something that I but few others had discussed in the past: FEMA administers a fund that was originally set up for homeless vets, the elderly, and tribal members but that has been transformed into a money source for NGOs and communities in providing for released migrants. (Seer this week’s episode of the Center’s “Parsing Immigration Policy” podcast for more background on this.)

That fund – the Emergency Food and Shelter Program (EFSP), aka: EFSP-Humanitarian, aka: the Shelter and Services Program (SSP) – had swelled from a modest $30 million program in FY 2019 to a $650 million cash bonanza in FY 2024 as the Biden-Harris administration cut loose millions of illegal migrants encountered by CBP at the Southwest border into towns and cities across the United States.

Many would-be voters were not happy to find that FEMA’s doling out hundreds of millions of dollars for migrants while the vice president was offering $750 payments to affected Americans in Appalachia.

I quickly wrote a post explaining that SSP money was separate from FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund (DRF), “the largest source of federal financial assistance after disasters”, but I may have been barking up the wrong tree: Many were shocked to find out that any FEMA money was going to migrants.

Harvard-Harris plainly had a better sense of the zeitgeist, however, because directly after they asked respondents whether the vice president responded well to Helene and Milton (responses presented on the same slide), they posed the following question: “Should any FEMA money have gone to housing immigrants here illegally, or should FEMA funds have not gone to that purpose?”

In response, 67 percent of the registered voters polled said that FEMA should not be paying to house illegal migrants (including 51 percent of Democrats and 73 percent of Independents), while just 33 percent believed that FEMA should be making such payouts. That’s an even 2-to-1 split in opposition to ESFP/ESFP-H/SSP.

https://cis.org/Arthur/Hurricanes-Lead-Surge-Voter-Concern-about-Immigration

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