Aaron Blake tries to square the circle:
While polling has long shown a clear and strong majority of Americans support a path to citizenship, some recent polls have shown far less support for legal status. While the NBC/WSJ poll shows Americans oppose legal status 48-39, a Washington Post-ABC News poll in September showed Americans opposed legalization 50-46. Among registered voters, it was 53-43.
Why the support for citizenship but not legal status? Your guess is as good as ours. Maybe people don’t like the idea of two classes of Americans. Maybe they think of citizenship as something that is earned, and legal status as something that is bestowed without cost to the beneficiary.
Whatever the reason, it bears emphasizing that Obama’s announcement tonight has much more to do with legal status and nothing to do with citizenship.
Kevin Drum focuses on the partisan split:
According to a USA Today poll,Democrats want action now; Republicans want him to wait; independents are split down the middle; and the overall result is slightly in favor of waiting, by 46-42 percent. In other words, pretty much what you’d expect. Politically, then, this probably holds little risk for Obama or the Democratic Party.
But Jonathan Cohn is unsure how the executive action will play out:
[A]s Greg Sargent notes, congressional action really isn’t an option right now. And the Obama Administration is likely to frame its action in ways that polls suggest the public likes—by emphasizing that people who go through the new programs will have to go through background checks and, afterwards, will have to start paying taxes. Will these arguments play well? Will the image of a president getting something done assuage those frustrated by Washington gridlock? Your guess is as good as mine—and I guess we’ll start to find out tonight.
Previous speculation about the popularity of Obama’s forthcoming executive order here.
The Dish 