On September 24, CNN reported that Vice President (and current Democratic presidential candidate) Kamala Harris “is planning to visit the US-Mexico border while in Arizona” for a campaign stop on September 27. The next paragraph, however, explains that “details of the visit ... are still being sorted out”. Let me explain why the Veep is thinking about going to the border — and why she may not end up going.
“Regardless of How You Might Vote, Who Do You Trust?” In the middle of August, after Democrats had swapped out Harris for President Biden as the party’s 2024 standard-bearer, Fox News released a poll of registered voters that shed light on how Harris’s entry into the race had changed their opinions on who the next president should be.
Question 27 in that poll asked: “Which one of the following [nine] issues will be MOST important in deciding your vote for president?”
The leading issue for respondents in that poll was the economy, the choice of 38 percent of those polled. Immigration and abortion tied for second at 14 percent of respondents each.
Note that this was a seven-point decline among those who considered immigration their most important electoral issue compared to a similar poll that Fox News conducted in February, and a four-point rise for abortion as an issue during that period.
The next questions — 28 through 38 — asked respondents, “Regardless of how you might vote, who do you trust to do a better job on each of the following” 11 issues. Some of the issues polled were identical to ones raised in question 27, while two — “uniting the country” and “border security” — were new.
Fox News never polled on either of those new topics previously in matchups between then-candidates Joe Biden and Donald Trump, but it had the others: “climate change”, “Supreme Court nominations”, “guns”, “crime”, the economy, “foreign policy”, abortion, and immigration.
On eight of those issues, Harris polled better against Trump than Biden had previously. The only issue on which Harris polled worse than Biden had been polling? Immigration.
In a Fox News poll conducted the month before, July 7 to 10, 2024, Trump had an 11-point edge over Biden on the second-most important issue to registered voters; in the August poll, Harris was 14 points underwater to Trump on it.
What’s worse, Harris’s worst issue among voters in a head-to-head matchup against Trump was border security: 39 percent of registered voters trusted the current vice president to secure the border, while a solid majority — 58 percent — trusted the former president more on the issue, 19 points in the wrong direction for Harris.
The Senate Border Bill. Harris has attempted to pivot away from the issues of immigration and the border by blaming Trump for the failure of the so-called “bipartisan Senate border bill”, proposed by Sens. James Lankford (R-Okla.), Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) in early February and quickly defeated in a Senate procedural vote three days later.
As Harris argued during her September 10 debate with Trump, moderated by ABC News:
And let me say that the United States Congress, including some of the most conservative members of the United States Senate, came up with a border security bill which I supported. And that bill would have put 1,500 more border agents on the border to help those folks who are working there right now over time trying to do their job. It would have allowed us to stem the flow of fentanyl coming into the United States. ... That bill would have put more resources to allow us to prosecute transnational criminal organizations for trafficking in guns, drugs and human beings. But you know what happened to that bill? Donald Trump got on the phone, called up some folks in Congress, and said kill the bill. [Emphasis added.]
The Center has previously analyzed that bill, and to say that it offered more new impediments to border security than it would have eliminated would be an understatement.
The issue is that the bill itself is 380 pages long, and few if any in the press have the time or acuity to not only read, but more importantly, to understand what it would do, and what it wouldn’t. Consequently, most of Harris’s claims about the legislation have not been publicly challenged.
Moderator David Muir did not do much to advance understanding of the bill when he followed up Harris’s statements with the following question to Trump: “Let me just ask, though, why did you try to kill that bill and successfully so? That would have put thousands of additional agents and officers on the border.”
That, as we say in the law, “assumes a fact not in evidence”: that the bill died because Trump “tried to kill it”.
Trump, however, lost that point, never actually discussing the bill and pivoting instead to other “immigration-adjacent” issues.
While reading thousands of lines of complicated bill text is a challenge for most reporters, actually looking up the Senate vote count on that bill is not.
Lankford was the only Senate supporter of that bill who could objectively be called, as Harris put it, “most conservative” — centrist Sens. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), and Susan Collins (R-Maine) also voted in favor during that test vote. But notably, opposition was “bipartisan” as well — Massachusetts Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, California Democrat Sen. Alex Padilla, New Jersey Democrat Bob Menendez, and even Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) joined 45 Republicans in voting against.
By the time the bill came up for a second vote in May, opposition to it was pouring in from both sides of the aisle, with Sens. Corey Booker (D-N.J.), Laphonza Butler (D-Calif.), and even Lankford and Sinema voting “nay” (Murkowski was the lone GOP holdout still in support).
I seriously question whether progressives like Sanders, Booker, or Warren would even take a call from Trump, and can guarantee that they wouldn’t allow their decision to be swayed by him.
Trump should have made that point (among others) in response to Muir’s question, but it’s just a matter of time before somebody in the media mentions it, which could blunt if not kill Harris’s attempt to foist the border issue off on her GOP opponent.
The Harris campaign likely knows that, and probably thinks it needs a picture of Harris with Border Patrol agents and local officials in front of the border wall to turn voters’ dour opinion of her on immigration.
Why Harris May Not Actually Go. That said, I’m not convinced the vice president will actually go to the border during her Arizona trip, or even any time between now and November 5. Here’s why.
As the Fox News poll shows, immigration and border security are Harris’s worst polling issues, just as they were Biden’s.
Harris supporters may contend, with some basis, that she was never “border czar”, but that claim plus her role as vice president seem to have solidified in the minds of most of the electorate that she bears at least some blame for the migrant surge over the past three-plus years.
For most of that time, however, neither immigration nor the border were on the radar of most voters. Those voters who cared, cared, but a majority of the electorate had bigger concerns.
That all quickly changed toward the end of 2023 when House Republicans started efforts to impeach DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the administration initiated its attacks on Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s own border-security efforts, and (ironically) the media began discussing the then-pending Senate border bill, as I explained back in July.
Want proof? In Fox News polling from August 2023, “just” 11 percent of registered voters stated that immigration was the biggest issue facing the country; four months later, in December, 19 percent said it was.
Nobody from either campaign is asking my opinion, but if I were advising Harris, I’d tell her to avoid immigration and the border at every opportunity and change the subject whenever those topics are brought up. Any response she gives with respect to either will just draw attention to them.
Perhaps Harris can spin gold from dross if she goes to the border, but at this point it appears voters’ poor impressions of the current administration’s efforts there have set. At this point, even a supermarket may be a better backdrop.