Definition
The Immigration Support Score predicts a person's likelihood to believe that widespread deportation causes harm to communities. Individuals with higher scores indicate greater likelihood of supporting the position that deportation causes harm.
Technical Details
The model was built from the following polling question:
Widespread deportation causes harm to communities.
- Strongly Disagree
- Disagree
- Neither Agree nor Disagree
- Agree
- Strongly Agree
Respondents who answered “Strongly Agree” or “Agree” are labeled as immigration supporters. Respondents who answered “Strongly Disagree”, “Disagree”, or “Neither Agree Nor Disagree” are labeled as non-supporters.
The Immigration Support Score was trained on polling data from the Winter 2025 Murmuration poll. We collected 8,002 responses online from registered voters in December 2025. The survey used stratified random sampling to ensure national representativeness across age, race, gender, partisanship, education and geography.
The model was trained using gradient-boosted decision trees. Model features were drawn from the Atlas by Murmuration dataset, which includes demographic (age, race, gender, etc.), commercial, geographic, and vote history information for all registered voters nationally.
Scores range from 0-100, where higher scores indicate greater likelihood that a voter supports immigration. The score represents the model's predicted probability (scaled to 0-100) that an individual believes widespread deportation causes harm to communities.
We validated the model's accuracy using a held-out set of 1,543 polling respondents (20% of the original survey sample) whose data was not used during model development. Among individuals with scores in the top 20% of the Immigration Support Score, 85% are actual immigration supporters—making them 76% more likely to support immigration (and believe widespread deportation causes harm) than the average voter.
Use Cases
- Persuasion and Education Campaigns: The Immigration Support Score helps campaigns identify moderate and persuadable voters who may oppose deportation but need activation on this issue. Partners can use mid-range Immigration Support Scores to find swing voters with latent immigration concerns, Republicans who may oppose harsh deportation policies due to faith or business community ties, and independents who may be open to progressive immigration messaging. This score can be layered with Partisan Scores to identify cross-pressured voters who hold immigration views that don't align with their typical partisan behavior. Persuasion campaigns benefit from targeting voters who show some support for immigration policies but may need additional information about local economic and community impacts of deportation to strengthen their position.
- Base Mobilization and GOTV: Campaigns can use high Immigration Support Scores to identify strong supporters of immigration policy for turnout and volunteer recruitment efforts. These high scoring individuals represent the core base on immigration issues and are prime candidates for get-out-the-vote programs. Partners should consider layering Immigration Support with turnout propensity scores to prioritize likely voters, volunteer propensity scores to recruit activists, and donation scores to identify potential contributors. This approach ensures that voter contact resources are directed toward supporters who are both aligned on immigration policy and likely to participate in electoral activities.
- Coalition Building and Community Engagement: The Immigration Support Score enables partners to find voters who oppose deportation but may not be reached through traditional progressive outreach channels. This score is particularly valuable when layered with demographic data such as ethnic community indicators, religious affiliation data, and geographic targeting in neighborhoods with large immigrant populations. Community organizations can use Immigration Support to prioritize outreach in areas where residents are directly impacted by immigration enforcement, ensuring that organizing efforts focus on those most likely to be responsive to immigration focused messaging.
Targeting Table
The table below shows the score values associated with each decile to help you more easily target using the Immigration Support Score nationally. Note: these score cutoffs may be different in your local districts.
| To target the top... | Set the minimum score value as... |
| 10% | 80 |
| 20% | 73 |
| 30% | 66 |
| 40% | 59 |
| 50% | 51 |
| 60% | 42 |
| 70% | 34 |
| 80% | 25 |
| 90% | 19 |
| 100% | 12 |