In 2025, Day by day Kos launched Survey Says, a data-focused column that reporter Alex Samuels and I commerce off writing each week. Every column contains a deep dive into polls and different information that’s driving politics, and every version options charts made by yours actually.
Listed here are 5 key charts from Survey Says this yr, every with up to date information.
1. A pointy swing on immigration—after which one other
If President Donald Trump has one defining challenge, it’s immigration. And headed into the 2024 presidential election, the subject was on each pundit’s lips. That’s partly as a consequence of surveys from corporations like Gallup, which showed in June 2024 that 55% of People needed to lower the variety of immigrants allowed into the nation.
And but, regardless of the quantity of protection that information level obtained, a number of months of Trump’s mass deportations shortly flipped issues on their head. All of a sudden, this previous June, the share of these wanting much less immigration plummeted to simply 30%—an identical share to the quantity that need to enhance immigration.
What brought about the change? As I explained in March—earlier than the brand new information got here out—such swings in public sentiment are as a consequence of what’s often called thermostatic public opinion, a concept positing that public opinion tends to maneuver in the other way of presidency motion.
What’s that imply in apply? In 2024, former President Joe Biden oversaw a sharp increase in border crossings. And in 2025, Trump is having his brokers arrest people at colleges, detain U.S. citizens, and separate children from their immigrant dad and mom.
2. A classic illness comes roaring again
What’s previous is new once more, and that features measles.
Sure, 2025 noticed the lethal illness come roaring again in the USA, with greater than 1,950 circumstances confirmed, according to data from the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention. Evaluate that with 2024, which noticed lower than 300 circumstances.
Worse, there’s been an uptick in circumstances since we final dove into the data in October.
Effectively, a minimum of we have now a Kennedy in command of the nation’s public well being equipment. Don’t know a lot about him, however I’m positive he has cheap opinions about vaccines.
3. Air journey stays protected, regardless of main tragedy
Simply 9 days after Trump retook the White Home, the nation suffered its worst business airline crash in additional than a decade, when an American Airways jet and an Military Black Hawk helicopter collided mid-air close to Ronald Reagan Washington Nationwide Airport. All 67 individuals aboard the 2 aircrafts have been killed.
The crash was adopted by months of viral social media clips exhibiting different jet abnormalities and accidents, like a ceiling partially caving in mid-flight, a jet rolling over on the tarmac, and aggressive flying maneuvers.
However regardless of the tragedy and the media’s elevated scrutiny, air journey remained very protected this yr, as Samuels noted in May. In reality, on the entire, it was even safer than in earlier years.
The peak of summer time journey, July is often the month when most accidents occur. However this July was tied for the third-lowest variety of accidents since 2000. That stated, Trump has fired hundreds on the Federal Aviation Administration, so it’s doable that this current document of security will take a grim flip.
4. AI: You realize it, you hate it, and it’s all of our cash now
Synthetic intelligence is degrading artwork and turbocharging misinformation, however a minimum of it’s additionally a monetary home of playing cards that a lot of the economic system relies on proper now.
Simply how absurd does it get? Nvidia, which makes chips for AI, has nearly five times the worth of Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer, but it surely pulls in less than one-fifth of Walmart’s income.
All of this has brought about People to view AI extra skeptically than they did within the current previous. It’s shocking that glibly joking about firing all human staff isn’t profitable individuals over.
5. Crimson-state bloodlust
As I wrote in August, “Republican states get pleasure from killing their prisoners, and with Donald Trump within the White Home, they’ve been much more keen to finish human life.”
My evaluation discovered that the nation was on monitor to execute 40 incarcerated individuals by yr’s finish, making for the best quantity since 2012.
However that was August, and issues have panned out even worse since then.
On Dec. 18, Florida killed Frank Athen Partitions, who has confessed to murdering a minimum of 5 individuals beginning when he was 17. Partitions grew to become the nation’s forty seventh execution this yr, making for essentially the most since 2009.
