Republicans fighting for their political lives this November can’t run on killing the popular Affordable Care Act (ACA), they can’t run on decimating Social Security for your grandma, and they certainly can’t run on massive tax cuts for fat cats with membership to Mar-a-Lago, so they’re doubling-down on what they know best: making you afraid of brown people.
“A review of nearly five dozen Republican-backed TV ads revealed a messaging strategy rooted in painting a dark portrait of immigrants, with a fixation on violence and crime,” The Guardian reports. ”The threat of MS-13 and so-called ‘sanctuary cities’ are frequent themes, juxtaposed with Republican candidates vowing to support Trump’s promised wall along the US-Mexico border.”
Of course, all of that ignores the facts. Immigrants are less likely than U.S.-born Americans to commit crime (your regular reminder that Donald Trump’s former campaign chair is sitting in jail right now), so-called “sanctuary cities” make communities safer, and MS-13—which is actually made in the U.S.A. following U.S. interventionism in Central America—“represents less than 1% of gangs in the United States.”
But then again facts don’t really matter to an anti-truth party only interested in stoking up Trumpian fearmongering. Seeing how hate helped Trump in 2016, they’re following suit, with immigrant rights advocacy group America’s Voice reporting “that more than $150 million has been spent on immigration attack ads this year—up fivefold over 2014.” There have been so many ads, that the group has created a searchable tracker. But the question is, will it pay off?
The convention wisdom is that this racist shit is a slam-dunk for Republicans. But that doesn’t take into account recent polling showing that Americans support immigration at a record level, and voters going into the midterm elections are pretty peeved about things like state-sanctioned kidnapping. Racist bullshit certainly didn’t pay off for Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie last year, despite the conventional wisdom, and it's not paying off Barbara Comstock, who has adopted Gillespie’s failed MS-13 strategy but is now down 12 points.
“As Geoff Garin, the pollster for Northam, told Robert Draper of the New York Times, ‘Gillespie ran the kinds of MS-13 ads that are now running in other parts of the country. We measured a real backlash to that advertising with suburban voters, in part because it connected Gillespie to the anti-immigrant thrust of Trump’s persona,’” America’s Voice continued. Unfortunately, a persona that continues.
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