Vilifying Immigrants Has Been the GOP's Go-To Political Strategy. But It’s an Electoral Loser. We Have The Receipts

Stephen Miller has been the mastermind of the GOP's failed strategy, promised it would deliver and spent millions on it. He's been wrong every time

Republicans have lost on the immigration since 2017. But instead of changing course, they’ve spent more money and gotten more extreme on the issue. According to the Washington Post this weekend, Donald Trump and his campaign “remain confident that immigration will be a leading issue and one where the American public prefers Trump over Harris.”

It’s basically his only issue these days. As Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice, recently assessed, “Every sentence from Donald Trump seems to contain a noun and a verb and a dehumanizing and dangerous lie about immigrants.” The Trump/GOP agenda on immigration was on full display at their convention in July with delegates gleefully waving “Mass Deportation Now” signs. And, Trump regularly vows to enact the largest mass deportation in history.

But for all the blather, the details behind that extreme plan remain opaque. 

Trump participated in two presidential debates, one with President Joe Biden in June and then one with Vice President Harris earlier this month. During both, he was specifically asked about his deportation agenda. Two debates. Two questions. No answer.

Republicans up and down the ballot have already spent over a half a billion dollars on hardline xenophobic fear mongering, a strategy that has repeatedly failed to deliver, anchored by a radical policy agenda that candidates are afraid to talk about.

Some in the media seem convinced that this is a winning strategy. Based on what - besides what the Trump campaign tells them?

Despite this increased investment into nativist attacks, the GOP’s electoral strategy of aggressive, xenophobic demagoguery has failed at the ballot box for Republicans in cycle after cycle in recent years. We’ve got the receipts. 

It failed to deliver in 2017, 2018, 2020, and 2022. Following Trump’s 2016 election, Republicans believed they had found the winning issue: bashing immigrants. But, the reality is that it hasn’t delivered. For example:

• In 2017, Trump campaign advisor Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller’s close ally and leading proponent of the nativist election strategy, claimed Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie’s embrace of aggressive nativist dog-whistling would be key to his victory. It wasn’t. He lost by 9 points. Research also found that Gillespie’s xenophobic ads backfired among all groups who saw the ad, including white voters.  

• In 2018, the GOP was fully behind the nativist election strategy. Trump railed about so-called “migrant caravans” throughout the fall of 2018. The number of immigration-related TV ads — and the amount of money spent on them — increased fivefold from 2016 to 2018. Wesleyan Media Project found that on Facebook, between August 1 and September 30, 23.3 percent of the Republican ads on the digital platform discussed immigration, while 80 percent of Republican TV ads in the cycle moved their nativist message. The Miller-led strategy of focusing on immigration and migrant caravans backfired on Republicans, who saw Democrats win by the largest midterm margin in American history.

• In 2020, Miller told Reuters that Biden’s immigration stance would prove to be “a massive political vulnerability” in that year’s presidential election. Between April and June 2020, the Trump campaign spent more on immigration ads on Facebook than on any other issue and our 2020 ad tracking project and report found that at the presidential level, Trump ran 157 unique ads that employed xenophobic messaging. Yet Biden won 306 electoral college votes and won by more than 7 million votes – the second time where Trump lost the popular vote, and by more than double the amount from 2016 – while the American public broke ever more sharply in a pro-immigrant direction.

• In 2022, after again increasing the investment into nativism, the ‘red wave’ failed to materialize. Miller appeared on his fellow white nationalist’s show, Tucker Carlson Tonight, to lay out what he believed was the winning GOP message for 2022: “I’m for deporting illegal aliens and you’re not, so I win and you lose.” Miller then ran a superPAC that spent over $50 million on ads to back that up. His candidates lost in NH, AZ, PA, and NV. 

Now, Republicans are spending even more money on an even more extreme message. But, their ads rarely mention the centerpiece issue of mass deportation. That’s a big tell.

Obviously, Miller, who has been wrong since 2017, is one of the masterminds of the GOP strategies. And, he may be one of the reasons leading Republicans don’t want to talk about the specifics of their master plan. Because when people learn more, it causes revulsion as we’ve seen in multiple polls.

Huff Post recently published an article, “Inside Team Trump’s Plans For Mass Deportation Camps,” that provided some details, many from Miller:

The mass deportation operation will be a “bloody story,” Trump said last weekend. And key advisers have promised a historic infrastructure project to churn people out of the country.

The camps will be built “on open land in Texas near the border” and should have the capacity to house as many as 70,000 people, which would double the United States’ current immigrant detention capacity, Stephen Miller, the main point man on immigration in Trump’s White House, said last year. In multiple interviews, Miller has gleefully described daily flights out of the camps to all corners of the world, an undertaking he said would be “greater than any national infrastructure project” in American history.

In his interview this past weekend with Full Measure’s Sharyl Attkisson, Trump offered a bit more info on his plan, taking inspiration from the Holocaust: “But we’re getting the criminals out, and we’re going to do that fast, and we know who they are, and the local police know their names, and they know their serial numbers,” Trump said. “They know everything about them.” Trump was apparently referencing the “A” numbers given to immigrants in deportation court, but in the context of the Holocaust’s atrocities – which included the tattooing of concentration camp prisoners – and Trump’s plan to detain thousands upon tens of thousands of immigrants in American camps, his remarks are absolutely chilling. And, given Trump’s other vile statements about immigrants that often mirrors Nazi rhetoric, it’s hard not to think the worst.

That kind of disturbing rhetoric might work with the hard-core MAGA base. And, as Adam Serwer wrote this week at The Atlantic, it’s also a strategy aimed at putting the race issue front and center, “The [Trump-Vance] campaign wants people—white people in particular—thinking about race, and hopes that these kinds of appeals will activate the necessary number of voters in the key swing states where the electorate is more conservative than the country as a whole.”

But, in the real world, it also causes a backlash.

Recently on CNN, JD Vance admitted on CNN that he lied about immigrants in his own state. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he said. What Vance is doing was accurately described as “blood libel” by America’s Voice legal advisor David Leopold.

The vicious lies have been repeatedly debunked by actual reporting - yet Vance and Trump won’t stop.

The consequences extend beyond politics. One of the strongest condemnations of Vance’s remarks came from Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro on the same CNN show:

Listen, the governor of Ohio, the mayor of that town in Ohio has said this is all made up, these are all lies, there is no truth to it.

And the United States senator from Ohio just came on your show and blamed his own constituents for his own lies.

This guy is so pathetic. But the thing is, it is dangerous. There is a causal connection between the B.S. that J.D. Vance and Donald Trump spew and the safety and security of the American people. When they go out and they lie about this stuff, they put their fellow Americans at risk.

Shapiro’s state knows first hand how dangerous the Trump/Vance racist lies are. In 2018, his state experienced the "causal connection" between the lies about immigrants and violence. In October of 2018, a white nationalist gunman killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. The mass gunman had invoked the so-called "caravans," which we noted was a frequent subject of Trump’s rallies and tweets during the fall of 2018.

And, of note, after the 2018 midterms, Trump dropped the use of that “caravan” language. As the Washington Post reported, “Before the midterms, Trump harped on the migrant caravan. Since then, he hasn’t brought it up.” 

The article pointed out, “Trump hasn’t tweeted about the caravan in days. His unwillingness to bring it up himself since the election has led critics to suggest that even the president knew that his level of attention to the issue was overblown.” Over the past few years, during campaign season, Trump has repeatedly claimed he invented the term “caravans” – including at a 2022 rally for JD Vance.

Unfortunately, Pittsburgh wasn’t the only city that experienced mass shootings inspired by hateful white nationalist conspiracy theories. El Paso did in 2019, and Buffalo in 2022. That hasn’t stopped Trump, Vance and the GOP from repeating this deadly rhetoric, including to a national audience at the GOP convention. And,Trump has kept up the vile rhetoric on the campaign trail, this week in Pennsylvania. Greg Sargent wrote at The New Republic about Trump’s attack on immigrants there, which got the crowd chanting, “send them back.” Sargent noted, “You cannot watch this bloodthirsty chant of ‘Send them back’ that erupted during his rally without immediately seeing that he’s appealing to something much darker and uglier.”

They continue to pursue this hateful dangerous rhetoric – even when it has failed to deliver victories. They’ve lost over and over, but won’t stop no matter the consequences. There’s something very twisted about that.