In 2025, Each 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 really.
Listed here are 5 key charts from Survey Says this 12 months, every with up to date information.
1. A pointy swing on immigration—after which one other
If President Donald Trump has one defining situation, it’s immigration. And headed into the 2024 presidential election, the subject was on each pundit’s lips. That’s partly resulting from surveys from companies like Gallup, which confirmed in June 2024 that 55% of Individuals needed to lower the variety of immigrants allowed into the nation.
And but, regardless of the quantity of protection that information level bought, a couple of months of Trump’s mass deportations rapidly flipped issues on their head. Abruptly, this previous June, the share of these wanting much less immigration plummeted to only 30%—an identical share to the quantity that wish to improve immigration.
What prompted the change? As I defined in March—earlier than the brand new information got here out—such swings in public sentiment are resulting from what’s generally known as thermostatic public opinion, a concept positing that public opinion tends to maneuver in the wrong way of presidency motion.
What’s that imply in observe? In 2024, former President Joe Biden oversaw a pointy improve in border crossings. And in 2025, Trump is having his brokers arrest folks at colleges, detain U.S. residents, and separate kids from their immigrant mother and father.
2. A classic illness comes roaring again
What’s outdated is new once more, and that features measles.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 instances confirmed, in accordance with information from the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention. Examine that with 2024, which noticed lower than 300 instances.
Worse, there’s been an uptick in instances since we final dove into the info in October.
Effectively, at the very least now we have a Kennedy in command of the nation’s public well being equipment. Don’t know a lot about him, however I’m certain he has affordable 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 industrial 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 folks aboard the 2 aircrafts had 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 12 months, as Samuels famous in Could. In reality, on the entire, it was even safer than in earlier years.
The peak of summer time journey, July is normally the month when most accidents occur. However this July was tied for the third-lowest variety of accidents since 2000. That mentioned, Trump has fired tons of on the Federal Aviation Administration, so it’s doable that this current file of security will take a grim flip.
4. AI: You recognize it, you hate it, and it’s all of our cash now
Synthetic intelligence is degrading artwork and turbocharging misinformation, however at the very least it’s additionally a monetary home of playing cards that a lot of the financial system is dependent upon proper now.
Simply how absurd does it get? Nvidia, which makes chips for AI, has practically 5 instances the worth of Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer, but it surely pulls in much less than one-fifth of Walmart’s income.
All of this has prompted Individuals to view AI extra skeptically than they did within the current previous. It’s stunning that glibly joking about firing all human employees isn’t successful folks 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 folks by 12 months’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 at the very least 5 folks beginning when he was 17. Partitions turned the nation’s forty seventh execution this 12 months, making for essentially the most since 2009.
