ICED Out in the Midterms

That was some night a week ago Tuesday, especially if you were a Democrat. Or a Republican, although shock was your emotion, not glee.

It’s hard to spin a defeat of that magnitude, but some Republicans are trying – two in particular. Vice President JD Vance weighed in and claimed the adverse election returns were all about the U.S. military incursion into Iran. Israel, Vance says, is the problem.

Leaving aside Vance sounding very much like Abdul El-Sayed, it was a self-serving explanation anyway, being that Vance is considered the in-house isolationist in the Trump administration. It’s also overly simplistic, according to the exit polls – and to Vance’s own boss. Yes, Donald Trump has offered a couple of elucidations of his own.

First of all, he wasn’t on the ballot, Trump keeps saying, notwithstanding the fact that he told voters beforehand about a thousand times to pretend otherwise. Trump also says that some of the GOP candidates weren’t the best quality. But as CBS “60 Minutes” interlocutor Ross Douthat pointed out to the president almost gingerly, Trump picked several of them himself, including a few Senate candidates who got beat, or barely survived, in states where Republicans are supposed to coast.

Now, it’s true, as Trump mentioned a few times, that a president’s political party generally gets shellacked in a midterm election. Nov. 3, 2026, was worse than usual, however, and much worse than expected. The economy played a huge role in voter disaffection, too, as did tariffs and other problematic administration policy initiatives. This morning, let’s look at the only issue Trump conceded he may have mishandled: immigration enforcement.

Going into Election Day, the Pew Research Center documented public antipathy for U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement, the agency tasked with carrying out the president’s fixation on mass deportation of people who came to this country illegally.

In Pew’s survey of every major federal agency, ICE came in dead last. ICE was even below the much-maligned Internal Revenue Service, and it wasn’t even close. The top three – and there was a big gap after that – were, in order, the National Park Service, the National Weather Service, and the U.S. Postal Service. You might be able to win a bar bet on the post office, but there you have it.

And yes, there was a huge partisan divide on ICE, the biggest of any agency, but only two-thirds of Republicans or Republican leaners expressed a favorable opinion toward the agency.

In an analysis that would have been refreshingly candid for any Washington partisan, let alone Trump, the president gave himself high marks for closing the border, but demerits for the excesses of his policy.

“I think it both helped and hurt,” he told Douthat. “I think I got an A-plus for closing up the border…I get very high marks for getting the bad ones out.”

But the president then quickly conceded that many illegal immigrants within the country were “good” people, which led to a backlash against his heavy-handed approach.

“But I get hurt because we also took people that had good jobs, that — that created one violation, or breaking of the law, and that was that they came into the country illegally,” he said.

“So you think your deportation policy – went too far?” Douthat asked.

“I think it was – too tough…I think it might be too tough, yeah,” Trump responded, adding, “And I think ultimately that hurt me.”

It’s unknown whether the president and ascendant congressional Democrats will be able to forge a legislation agreement on this thorny subject. But if they can, they will be heeding majority opinion.

According to the NBC exit polls, among Americans who voted in the 2026 midterms, 60% disapproved of how ICE is performing its job. Among Hispanics, who broke nearly evenly for Trump two years ago, 69% faulted ICE, with 87% of them voting for Democrats.