Now this is interesting: Evidence that Donald Trump's toxic campaign status is also causing American voters to shift their opinions about one of his, and the Republican Party's, key policy demands.
The PEPS data track changes in support for the [border] wall among the same individuals who were interviewed in December-January and July-August 2016. Their support for the border wall dropped from 48 percent to 38 percent.
More importantly, the PEPS data reveal who was particularly likely to shift to opposing the border wall: people who did not like Trump in 2015.
Got that? Support for building a "border wall," a staple of Republican campaigning (and conspiracy theories) for eons now, has dropped roughly ten points during the time Trump has campaigned on the issue, fueled mostly by voter's contempt for Trump. A similar shift in public opinions about Muslims was also seen. In both cases, we can guesstimate that the shift is among not particularly involved Americans who didn't hold strongly to those past views, and who were motivated to reconsider them after seeing Trump advocate for them. So Trump is having a measurable effect on politics, in that his rhetoric is so bad that it's causing people to flee from his positions, and the positions of his party, rather than be seen holding those positions too.
Building a border wall and expecting it to "solve" unauthorized immigration has always been a ridiculous premise. But it took a truly ridiculous candidate to bring that point home.
Did I mention we may very well be witnessing the crack-up of the Republican Party itself? There's no telling how long these opinion shifts will last, but if Trump is truly obliterated in the general election, and takes a good chunk of the party with him on the way down, it's not clear those voters will shift back to the party or its xenophobic policy pronouncements anytime soon. The Republican Party has long been made up of an uneasy alliance between the ultra-rich and a less wealthy xenophobic base, and as poster child for both those fragments Donald Trump is doing a bang-up job discrediting the ideologies of each.