Political analysts expressed their shock at learning that swing voters are unfamiliar with the latest killings by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
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During an episode of The Next Level, former Republican pollster Sarah Longwell revealed that a focus group she held this week found that swing voters and voters from swing states hadn’t heard about the ICE killings in Texas and Maine.
“We asked about these shootings. They didn’t know they’d happened, hadn’t heard anything about them, just didn’t even know,” Longwell said. “We do not have an engaged populace in this. People are not paying attention the same way.”
Longwell suggested that voters don’t pay as much attention when the victims of the shootings aren’t American citizens, unlike the cases of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis in January. In those situations, “‘People can sort of put themselves like, ‘Hey, I could have been out in those streets and cops are just shooting me,'” Longwell said.
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With the latest killings, Lorenzo Salgado Ajaujo, the victim in Texas, was a Mexican national, and Joan Sebastian Guerrero was a Colombian with legal status.
“The other difference was it wasn’t caught on tape,” Longwell said. “When things are caught on tape and people are able to do their own Rorschach investigation of what am I seeing here.”
Former GOP operative Tim Miller admitted that “this is something that I’ve changed my view on.” He said denunciatory posts that “make you roll your eyes” are “better than the alternative of nothing.” He noted that the Trump administration reeled operations back after reactions to the Minneapolis shootings.
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