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In 2025, Daily Kos launched Survey Says, a data-focused column that reporter Alex Samuels and I trade off writing every week. Each column features a deep dive into polls and other data that’s driving politics, and each edition features charts made by yours truly.
Here are five key charts from Survey Says this year, each with updated data.
1. A sharp swing on immigration—and then another
If President Donald Trump has one defining issue, it’s immigration. And headed into the 2024 presidential election, the topic was on every pundit’s lips. That’s partly due to surveys from firms like Gallup, which showed in June 2024 that 55% of Americans wanted to decrease the number of immigrants allowed into the country.
And yet, despite the amount of coverage that data point got, a few months of Trump’s mass deportations quickly flipped things on their head. Suddenly, this past June, the share of those wanting less immigration plummeted to just 30%—a similar share to the number that want to increase immigration.
What caused the change? As I explained in March—before the new data came out—such swings in public sentiment are due to what’s known as thermostatic public opinion, a theory positing that public opinion tends to move in the opposite direction of government action.
What’s that mean in practice? In 2024, former President Joe Biden oversaw a sharp increase in border crossings. And in 2025, Trump is having his agents arrest people at schools, detain U.S. citizens, and separate children from their immigrant parents.
2. A vintage disease comes roaring back
What’s old is new again, and that includes measles.
Yes, 2025 saw the deadly disease come roaring back in the United States, with more than 1,950 cases confirmed, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Compare that with 2024, which saw less than 300 cases.
Worse, there’s been an uptick in cases since we last dove into the data in October.
Well, at least we have a Kennedy in charge of the nation’s public health apparatus. Don’t know much about him, but I’m sure he has reasonable opinions about vaccines.
3. Air travel remains safe, despite major tragedy
Just nine days after Trump retook the White House, the nation suffered its worst commercial airline crash in more than a decade, when an American Airlines jet and an Army Black Hawk helicopter collided mid-air near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. All 67 people aboard the two aircrafts were killed.
The crash was followed by months of viral social media clips showing other jet abnormalities and accidents, like a ceiling partially caving in mid-flight, a jet rolling over on the tarmac, and aggressive flying maneuvers.
But despite the tragedy and the media’s increased scrutiny, air travel remained very safe this year, as Samuels noted in May. In fact, on the whole, it was even safer than in previous years.
The height of summer travel, July is usually the month when most accidents happen. But this July was tied for the third-lowest number of accidents since 2000. That said, Trump has fired hundreds at the Federal Aviation Administration, so it’s possible that this recent record of safety will take a grim turn.
4. AI: You know it, you hate it, and it’s all of our money now
Artificial intelligence is degrading art and turbocharging misinformation, but at least it’s also a financial house of cards that much of the economy depends on right now.
Just how absurd does it get? Nvidia, which makes chips for AI, has nearly five times the value of Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer, but it pulls in less than one-fifth of Walmart’s revenue.
All of this has caused Americans to view AI more skeptically than they did in the recent past. It’s surprising that glibly joking about firing all human workers isn’t winning people over.
5. Red-state bloodlust
As I wrote in August, “Republican states enjoy killing their prisoners, and with Donald Trump in the White House, they’ve been even more eager to end human life.”
My analysis found that the nation was on track to execute 40 incarcerated people by year’s end, making for the highest number since 2012.
But that was August, and things have panned out even worse since then.
On Dec. 18, Florida killed Frank Athen Walls, who has confessed to murdering at least five people starting when he was 17. Walls became the nation’s 47th execution this year, making for the most since 2009.
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Andrew Mangan
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