On Tuesday, former President Donald Trump was again elected to the White House after a four-year interregnum. While any electoral victory is the result of numerous issues and factors, two stand out: voters’ displeasure with the rate of inflation and with out-of-control immigration under the policies implemented by the Biden-Harris administration. With respect to the latter, the administration and most of the media did the American people few favors in hiding what has been happening at the Southwest border over the past four years and on Election Day voters returned the favor.
Inflation. You don’t have to trust me about the issues that weighed on voters’ minds in the 2024 presidential election. The Associated Press (AP) surveyed 115,000 voters nationwide to assess the electorate’s key concerns when they cast their ballots, publishing its results the day after the election as “AP VoteCast”.
With respect to rising costs, the outlet explained:
Anxiety about inflation was high nationally, and voters broadly believed that Trump would be better equipped than Harris to handle the economy and jobs. The key swing states of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin largely mirrored the mood of the nation.
The share of voters who said their family’s financial situation was “falling behind” rose to about 3 in 10, up from roughly 2 in 10 in the last presidential election. Many voters were still reeling from inflation that spiked to a four-decade high in June 2022. About 9 in 10 voters were very or somewhat concerned about the cost of groceries, and about 8 in 10 were concerned about their health care costs, their housing costs or the cost of gas.
Trump’s challenger, Vice President Kamala Harris, attempted to address those concerns by promising she would build an “opportunity economy” that would expand and support the middle class and tackle rising grocery prices by going after “bad actors” engaging in “price gouging” at the federal level (37 states already have their own price-gouging laws).
Even CNN questioned whether that price-gouging effort would create more problems than it would solve, but in any event few were buying the implication that the food industry runs a secret cartel that controls the cost of eggs, meat, and milk everywhere from Pismo Beach to Paducah.
Harris also contended, not without basis, that the U.S. economy has actually been recovering nicely from post-Covid supply-chain issues that had boosted costs, but that was cold comfort to workers who had already seen their real wages shrink following earlier massive price increases.
Neither Trump nor Harris offered any concrete proposals to raise the standard of living, but then the former president likely didn’t need to given that the U.S. economy created nearly seven million jobs between January 2017 (when Trump took office) and February 2020 (the month before the pandemic was declared) even while inflation was largely held in check.
Immigration. Which brings me to immigration.
As the AP VoteCast noted, 40 percent of voters nationally stated that aliens here illegally should be deported, up from 30 percent during the last presidential election in 2020 and a position that rose to 80 percent of voters in the key swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin — each “far from the southern border” yet impacted by the massive flow of illegal migrants under the Biden-Harris administration.
Most tellingly, in its Wednesday post-mortem of the election results, the Wall Street Journal reported, “Immigration was the second most important issue for voters, increasing to 20% from 3% in 2020.”
Trump likely erred in failing to make the border a bigger issue in the 2020 presidential election, which he lost to President Biden in a squeaker, particularly given that the then-Democratic nominee’s campaign proposals were almost certain to boost illegal immigration to this country.
As I explained in January 2020 — more than a year before Biden took office — the immigration policies he was then pitching:
would, in tandem, serve as a magnet to hundreds of thousands if not millions of migrants seeking illegal entry to the United States, safe in the knowledge that if they were simply able to make it to the Southwest border, they could live and work in the United States indefinitely, regardless of the strength of their asylum claims, or even if they had any such claims at all. They would serve as a "Smuggler's Relief Act", and line the pockets of cartels that charge a "tax" for the transit of every migrant across "their" territory.
While that may have been prescient, I hardly could have been the first or only person who could see the inevitable border surge that would follow. But the border security Americans enjoyed in 2020 numbed all but 3 percent of them to the possibility that it wouldn’t last.
H.L. Mencken once explained: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” Most Americans may not have known in 2020 they were voting for the illegal entry of millions of migrants, but that’s what they were doing, and it’s what they got.
The border crisis didn’t make much of an impact in the 2022 mid-term elections, probably because the administration refused to call it a crisis and the press — either deliberately or ignorantly — largely failed to cover it.
That press blackout of the border was (almost definitely) the reason why 75 percent of respondents in a December 2022 Harvard/Harris poll wildly underestimated the number of illegal border crossings.
In FY 2022, agents at the Southwest border apprehended more than 2.2 million illegal migrants. Yet when Harvard/Harris asked 1,851 registered voters how many illicit annual border crossings they then thought were occurring annually, three-quarters said there were one million or fewer (the most popular response, offered by 21 percent of those polled, was “between 100,000 and 250,000” — off by a factor of eight).
Not surprisingly, as the Journal states, just 9 percent of voters that year considered immigration to be “the most important issue facing the country”.
Various developments after the November 2022 mid-term elections — the GOP House’s impeachment of DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, big-cities’ struggles to deal with their own burgeoning migrant crises, and the so-called bipartisan “Senate border bill” key among them — finally forced media outlets to report on what was occurring at the Southwest border.
Once the public discovered what they hadn’t previously been told, voters’ concerns rose. “Immigration” topped the list of “most important issues facing the country” In a January 2024 Harvard/Harris poll, beating out inflation, the economy, and crime.
The administration then went into damage control by wheedling the Mexican government to impede migrants’ progress toward the U.S. Southwest border while curbing illegal entrants’ ability to apply for asylum in the United States.
In hindsight, it was too little and too late to save the vice president from opponents’ claims that she was “border czar” and therefore uniquely responsible for the migrant tsunami that had already crashed ashore.
And up until the end, Kamala Harris refused to offer clear facts about the migrant surge. Consider the following exchange between the vice president and Bret Baier on Fox News on October 16:
Baier: You know, voters tell pollsters all over the country and here in Pennsylvania that immigration is one of the key issues that they're looking at this election and specifically the influx of illegal immigrants from more than 150 countries. How many illegal immigrants would you estimate your administration has released into the country over the last three and a half years?
Harris: Well, I'm glad you raised the issue of immigration because I agree with you. It is — it is a topic of discussion that people want to rightly have. And you know what I'm going to talk about right now which is —
Baier: Yeah. But do you — just a number. Do you think it's 1 million, 3 million?
Harris: Brett, let's just get to the point, OK? The point is that we have a broken immigration system that needs to be repaired. And —
Baier: So, your Homeland Security secretary said that 85 percent of apprehensions —
Harris: Well, I'm not — but I'm not finished. I'm not finished. We have a — we have an immigration system that needs to be — but –
Baier: It's a rough estimate of 6 million people have been released into the country. And let me just finish. I'll get to the question. I promise you.
Harris: I was beginning to answer.
I’ll cut to the chase and tell you she never did answer the question, but the House Judiciary Committee reports that the actual number of migrant releases is closer to eight million.
Had fears about the economy not been such a big issue for struggling Americans (39 percent told AP it was their key concern), the percentage of those who voted based on immigration likely would have much larger. As is, immigration swamped “abortion” — a cornerstone of the vice president’s campaign, but the biggest issue for just 11 percent of the electorate according to VoteCast.
Perhaps the media — Fox News aside — didn’t know what was happening at the border, maybe they trusted the administration’s border claims, or possibly they were running immigration cover for the White House, but reporters failed to keep the public informed as nearly eight million aliens were ushered into the United States illegally. Once voters found out, though, they weren’t pleased.