When Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross shot Minnesota resident and mother of three Renee Good in the head last week, Republicans immediately declared that Americans would overwhelmingly support the killing. Little of the footage had been verified at that point, some hadn’t even be released, and no one, of course, had any way of telling how the public would react. But this was never a credible prediction so much as a cynical attempt to create a self-fulfilling prophecy: if Americans were told that Americans supported the killing, maybe Americans would support it.

Thus we got messages like this from Republican pundit Sohrab Ahmari:

Because there are actually lots of good people on the Left with whom I agree on various things, I feel compelled to say: Guys, this is one of those instances where you’re going all in on a case that’s 70-30 (at best) against you. (Feel free to dismiss this.)

In the days that immediately followed, various pundits attempted to extrapolate from some past polling (and a tangential snap poll by YouGov) how Americans would actually react. But now that a week has passed, we know. And it’s not looking good for ICE:

By an average margin of more than 22 points, Americans overwhelmingly find that ICE’s killing of Renee Good was unjustified (a scenario we traditionally describe as “murder”). Republicans weren’t just wrong in predicting a landslide of support for ICE; the landslide went in the exact opposite direction. Ahmari’s prediction was wrong by a hilarious margin of 62 points, a failure that should permanently discredit his media branding as a post-partisan populist who’s in touch with the American people.

And as bad as these numbers are, the details are even worse. Just look at the crosstabs:

Aside from the predictable partisan and ideological splits, pollsters have yet to find a demographic where this killing has majority support. Even among white Americans — who are historically much more likely to defend state violence against civilians — a slim but solid majority say that the killing was unjustified.

Some more interesting numbers from Data for Progress’s survey:

It’s not just that the numbers are bad — they’re likely to get significantly worse. The more Americans learn about this killing, the more they disapprove of it; people who have heard “a lot” about it are 18 points more likely to condemn ICE than those who have heard nothing at at all.

Though a lot of pundits seemed to come into this controversy thinking that Renee Good’s killing would be viewed through an exclusively partisan lens, I don’t think the numbers are bearing this out. One reason for this, I think, is that the bootlicking, hypercynical voices that dominate Republican discourse today are somewhat at odds with an enduring strain of anti-government paranoia on the Right that is reflexively hostile to any form of government authority. Sohrab Ahmari may think that most rural white working-class conservatives will always side with law-and-order policing, but a lot of them are a lot more like Dale Gribble, and the sight of a masked government agent shooting an unarmed civilian on an extremely flimsy pretext has to at least cause some cognitive dissonance among their kind.

Much has been made of the fact that Americans may be more sympathetic toward Renee Good, because of their identity, than they might be toward other victims; she may be a lesbian, but she is also a mother of three, a Christian, and between the dog in her car and the stuffies on her passenger seat she was surrounded by cultural signifiers that almost everyone will find relatable. That said, I don’t think that too much should be made of this point. George Floyd — a poor black man selling loosies — was the sort of victim that one might predict Americans would find less sympathetic, and yet polls found that most Americans found his murder unjustified by an even bigger margin of 71 to 17. In that case, too, the only demographic that came close to viewing him unsympathetically was Donald Trump voters.

The most dispositive factor, of course, is probably just the footage of what actually happened. Republican officials and activists can tell Americans to doubt their lying eyes all they like, but it is very difficult to watch the clips of Good’s killing and not see a belligerent ICE agent who is in zero danger whatsoever shooting multiple rounds into an innocent civilian who is just trying to de-escalate the situation and drive away.