Immigration dominated the GOP debate, but it’s not the political winner Republicans think

The issue of immigration and border security looms large in the 2024 election. Republicans have made it clear they intend to run on immigration and attempt to weaponize the issue against President Joe Biden and the Democrats. Last night, American voters were treated to a front-row seat of their dizzyingly draconian rhetoric during the second GOP debate.

With Donald Trump as the likely standard bearer, harsh rhetoric and cruel immigration policies and proposals — such as family separation, deportation of U.S.-born children, forced migrant busing, military invasion of Mexico, deadly razor wire on the Rio Grande, the outright killing of migrants and ending birthright citizenship — will only escalate.

In fact, during last night’s debate we saw Vivek Ramaswamy once again embrace the mass deportation of millions of American citizens and various candidates talk about an illegal and unconstitutional military mobilization against Mexico.

This may be the way to win over their anti-immigrant MAGA base, but history shows it will not help them electorally. It will turn off independent voters, suburban women, Latinos and younger, multicultural voters. There is substantial data to prove this.

Republicans at all levels have tried to run against Democrats on immigration and the border ever since Trump won the 2016 election. According to AdImpact, in 2022 Republican-aligned groups spent more than $170 million on anti-immigrant TV ads in just 10 battleground states.

And despite predictions from Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon — and other pundits and commentators — that immigration will cost Democrats bigly in the 2024 election, the evidence is overwhelming that immigration as a general election electoral wedge issue has lost its edge.

Let’s start with the 2017 Virginia elections, when Republicans tried to use scare tactics in their ads — featuring Latino-looking gang members with tattooed faces — to hit Democrats as being both weak on immigration enforcement and soft on crime. The result? Democrats won decisively as the xenophobic ads backfired with Northern Virginia voters.

Once in office, Trump started implementing a series of anti-immigrant proposals, like the Muslim ban and then the infamous family separation policy, which to this day has left kids orphaned without knowing where their deported parents ended up.

In the 2018 midterms, Trump decided to nationalize the race with a relentless focus on “caravans and criminals.” He warned that terrorists and “bad hombres” were on their way to invade our nation and to become Democratic voters, in what has become a favorite right-wing conspiracy called “white replacement theory.”

The result? Democrats took back the House, winning by nine points — the largest margin in midterm election history, and a clear rebuke of Trump’s hateful, inhumane policies that put off even Republican voters, especially white suburban women.

In 2020, four years in on Trump’s harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric and cruel policies (including working to end the popular deportation protection policy for Dreamers known as DACA), he didn’t relent on trying to make immigrants the bogeymen that Americans could blame for every malady in their communities. In fact, he doubled down on these horrific policies. The result? A history-making 80 million Americans voted against him and elected Biden.

More recently, in 2022, a promised “red wave” threatened to topple Democratic Senate candidates in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Georgia and Pennsylvania, and Republicans were dreaming of taking back control of the House of Representatives with a 40-plus majority. Democrats in key Senate races were bombarded on immigration and border security with hard-edged, blistering attack ads.

Democrats won every one of these Senate races. If it were true that immigration and border security are lethal to Democratic candidates with swing voters in swing states, we would be talking about Senators Blake Masters in Arizona, Adam Laxalt in Nevada and Herschel Walker in Georgia.

This is not to say border security is not electorally important. It has a great deal of salience with Republican voters and considerable salience with independent voters. But one of the most underreported political stories in recent years is how Democrats in must-win states, like Mark Kelly in Arizona and John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, learned how to lean in on the issue; define themselves as balanced and sensible; embrace pro-immigrant, humane values; and win the majority of voters.

Americans are not anti-immigrant. We are a country founded by immigrants. But Americans are anti-chaos, and that is why President Biden has implemented several policies to help manage immigration and allow work permits for newly arrived migrants, a commonsense approach to alleviate pressure at the border and help boost local economies. But he and Democrats in Congress must do more.

So when serious Republicans decide it’s better to work with Democrats to truly fix our broken asylum and immigration system than to try to weaponize and run on it, Democrats will be ready to partner on a tough issue that demands a bipartisan legislative breakthrough to finally fix the problem.

But this was not what Americans heard last night. Instead, what they heard from every GOP primary candidate — and what Donald Trump has already promised to implement if elected — are the harshest, most pernicious policies that speak to the worst of our instincts. This is not what Americans want.

It seems Republicans will keep overstating the electoral impact of immigration, swinging and missing; Democrats will keep preaching commonsense balanced solutions; and voters will keep favoring the practical, humane answers that reflect true American values.

Maria Cardona is a longtime Democratic strategist; a principal at Dewey Square Group, a Washington-based political consulting agency; and a CNN/CNN Español political commentator. Follow her @MariaTCardona.