When Republicans need to mobilize the GOP base, boost their support among November voters, sow division within the Democratic Party or deflect attention from a negative topic or event, their go-to issues in recent years often have been border security and immigration. As long as they avoid overtly racist and dehumanizing rhetoric and actions, border security and immigration are generally winning issues for Republican federal and state-level candidates.
As a result, we should expect border security and immigration to feature prominently in U.S. Senate and U.S. House races across the country in 2024 as Republicans employ the issues with four distinct, but often interwoven, goals in mind.
First, border security and immigration consistently rank among the top policy priorities for Republican primary voters, with near unanimity in favor of more robust border security and a more stringent, and less permissive, approach to enforcing existing immigration law. Adopting a hawkish position on border security and immigration is one of the best routes to victory in a Republican primary, and furthermore, will aid in the mobilization of Republican voters in November.
Second, advocating for enhanced border security and a reduction in undocumented immigration is also a winning strategy among November voters in most of the approximately 10 states and 50 to 75 congressional districts where the respective U.S. Senate and U.S. House election is expected to be at least somewhat competitive in 2024. Thus, unlike the case with some issues where Republican candidates often find the standard GOP position to have only minority support in a state or district, such as abortion and gun control, in the realm of border security and immigration the Republican policy position is much more commonly shared by a majority of voters.
One incorrect assumption made by some coastal Democratic elites is that Latinos in states like Arizona, Florida, Nevada and Texas will automatically side en masse with the candidate who has the most progressive position on immigration. Reality is more complex, with Republican candidates regularly winning between 35 and 50 percent of the Latino vote in these states, in spite of almost always advocating for a more conservative approach to border security and immigration than their Democratic rival. For instance, in the 2022 gubernatorial races in Arizona and Texas, the Republican candidates, Kari Lake and Greg Abbott, both border hawks, won 47 percent and 40 percent of the Latino vote respectively; and in his landslide victory in Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis won 58 percent.
Third, border security and immigration policy create deep fissures within the Democratic Party. The result is most commonly a no-win situation for Democratic candidates.
If they advocate for the more open borders and amnesty policies favored by many in the party’s progressive wing, they alienate the party’s moderates and key November swing voters. If, however, they support the expedited deportation of asylum seekers and more aggressive enforcement of immigration law favored by the party’s centrist wing, they alienate the party’s progressives, who in turn either attempt to defeat them in the Democratic primary or do not support them as enthusiastically in November. And, if they attempt to adopt a position in between these two Democratic extremes, as the Biden administration has tended to do, they often leave everyone dissatisfied.
Democratic candidates in competitive races have by and large learned that their best option in the fall when it comes to the issues of border security and immigration is to avoid them when possible.
Fourth, Republican candidates in competitive elections will this cycle often find themselves on the wrong side of the majority of voters in their state or district on several issues where the Republican position enjoys strong support within the GOP base, but much weaker support among those individuals who turn out to vote in November. As a result, when their Democratic opponent attempts to tie them to out-of-the-mainstream GOP positions in the issue areas of abortion and gun control, or to the myriad legal difficulties and other flaws of Donald Trump (who today is the likely 2024 GOP standard bearer), we can expect Republicans to often try to divert the debate to the topics of border security and immigration.
Between the start of the 2024 congressional Republican primary season in early March through the Nov. 5 general election, a large proportion of Republican candidates in competitive general election races across the country will make border security and immigration one of their primary campaign planks, just as many of their Democratic rivals will avoid the topics as much as possible.
Republican prioritization and Democratic avoidance of border security and immigration are, therefore, likely to be a theme that ties together competitive U.S. Senate races from Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin in the Upper Midwest to Arizona, Nevada and Texas in the Southwest, along with dozens of competitive U.S. House contests from coast to coast.
Mark P. Jones is the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy’s fellow in political science and the Joseph D. Jamail chair in Latin American Studies at Rice University as well as a co-author of “Texas Politics Today.” Follow him on Twitter @MarkPJonesTX.