When Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, Democrat of Nevada, briefed fellow moderate senators in her party this week about new research on voters’ views ahead of the midterm elections, she had grim but familiar news.
Democrats lagged badly behind the G.O.P. when it came to crime, policing and safety — issues on which many independent voters regard them as weak, she said, pointing to a new strategy memo commissioned by an outside group that supports moderate candidates. Democrats were down substantially on the basic issue of “keeping people safe from crime,” the new research showed, even with President Trump’s approval rating sagging.
But she noted a silver lining in the survey, which like many others found a belief among a sizable majority, including many independents, that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had gone too far in the deportation crackdown. That, according to the pollsters, gave Democrats an opening to press for changes if they did so with “nuance,” emphasizing their support for combating crime and support for local police but arguing that ICE had gone too far.
And Ms. Cortez Masto pitched her party’s disadvantage on crime as a place where — with the right policies and messaging — Democrats had room, and a political imperative, to grow.
The memo helps explain the tricky politics of the current fight in Congress over homeland security funding, and how the two parties are positioning themselves on the issues of crime and immigration. In demanding new restrictions on Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown, leading Democrats have emphasized that they simply want federal agents to follow basic standards of law enforcement.
Republicans, by contrast, have been portraying Democratic-run states and cities as dangerous sanctuaries for crime, and accusing Democrats of coddling criminals — a charge the survey indicates is a widely held opinion among voters.
Ms. Cortez Masto has been urging her colleagues to “lead with toughness” when it comes to talking about and dealing with violent criminals. The polling memo she passed around asserted that voters want Democrats to talk about “punishment,” and that such messages would resonate in particular with Black and Latino voters, as well as independent and swing voters, who could be crucial to their uphill battle to win control of the Senate.
“They’re hearing the same thing in their communities,” Ms. Cortez Masto said in an interview on Friday. “It is about cracking down on crime and holding the violent criminals accountable.”
When it comes to “cracking down on crime,” key groups of voters favored Republicans over Democrats by substantial margins, according to the polling analysis. Democrats, it said, were more associated in voters’ minds with being weak on sentencing, caring more about the criminal and being weak on immigration, the survey said.
The poll and accompanying memo, drawn up by Hart Research and Impact Research, was commissioned by the Mod Squad Action, which supports moderate candidates.
It was conducted in 10 competitive states: Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.
Ms. Cortez Masto has presented the findings to a group of moderate Democrats from several of those states and others, including her fellow Nevadan, Senator Jacky Rosen; Senators Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego, both of Arizona; Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, who is facing re-election in November; and Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan. The survey was conducted in December, just before the recent fatal shootings in Minneapolis by federal agents.
But even then, the poll pointed to a substantial appetite among voters for reining in ICE, even among those who considered Republicans to be tougher on crime than Democrats.
The “effective” Democratic position on ICE, the pollsters concluded, was to emphasize the need to detain undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes. But it said Democrats needed to immediately pivot to criticizing the Trump administration for going too far and detaining as many people as possible, regardless of whether they had committed any crime.
“What’s happening with Trump’s ICE right now is — it’s just the opposite of community safety,” Ms. Cortez Masto said. “Over 75 percent of ICE arrests are of people who have no criminal records. That’s what people are seeing and understanding.”
Many Republicans have long sought to portray a broad swath of immigrants as criminals who threaten American communities, and in the current debate, have characterized Democratic proposals to rein in ICE as dangerously weak.
On Thursday, for instance, Senator Katie Britt, Republican of Alabama, made comments in an interview with ABC News and then posted on social media that “criminal illegal aliens must be detained and then deported,” adding that “radical sanctuary city policies are putting families, communities and law enforcement officers at risk.”
The poll underscored the worries of some Democrats that progressive calls to “abolish ICE” will ultimately serve as a distraction from more pragmatic approaches that could help them expand the Democratic coalition.
Progressives, however, have pointed to polling that shows growing support for doing away with the agency. And many of them have said Democrats should not support funding the Department of Homeland Security under any circumstances given Mr. Trump’s aggressive deportation drive.
Ms. Cortez Masto, a former attorney general and federal prosecutor, is a lawmaker who Democrats often point to as an example of the kind of law-and-order candidate who can reliably win a swing state. She has long pushed for more support for law enforcement in her party, and when she is home during congressional recesses, she often spends her time doing ride-alongs with local police units and talking to sheriffs in jails about their programming.
Last year, Ms. Cortez Masto clashed with Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, on the Senate floor, when he accused her of being “complicit” with an authoritarian president by trying to push through policing bills when the Justice Department was “weaponizing” public safety grants against states and cities that “resist the Trump policy agenda.”
Since then, she has passed three of the eight bipartisan bills that Mr. Booker moved to block, which are designed to support local law enforcement.
“I know my colleagues in swing states understand this,” Ms. Cortez Masto said. “For big-picture Democrats, they’re coming to understand we’ve got to do more.”
Annie Karni is a congressional correspondent for The Times.
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