Republicans’ Billion-Dollar Bet on Nativism
Republican-aligned campaigns are on track to spend well over a billion dollars on nativist attack ads
It is a little over three weeks til November 5, and Republicans’ closing message is nothing if not consistent– ‘your well-being, your future, and that of the nation’s rests on a purge of the mass parasitic foreigners living amongst us.’ Republican-aligned campaigns are on track to spend well over a billion dollars this year in an attempt to sell this nativist lie to American voters.
Trump spelled out the strategy to his supporters in Wisconsin last weekend: “I know they do all these polls, and the polls say it’s the economy, and the polls say very strongly it’s inflation, and I can understand it a little bit,” Trump said. “To me, it’s the horrible people that we’re allowing into our country that are destroying our country. And it’s the hardest problem to solve too.”
This is a massive investment in a strategy that repeatedly failed to deliver, but apparently, one they hope will succeed if they dump more money and dehumanization into the electoral strategy. Color us skeptical. But the billion-dollar price tag sure has our attention.
Republican-aligned campaigns have spent $681 million on 1,615 unique TV ads that mention immigration so far this year, according to data pulled from AdImpact. As we noted in our report last month, this spend is a massive increase over years past, about three times as much as the record-breaking number in 2022. According to AdImpact, the Republicans’ most aired TV ad was from MAGA Inc that aired 20k times in NC, GA, PA accusing Harris of “put[ting] violent illegals, convicted felons back on the streets”. The rhetoric in the ads has also gotten exponentially worse, including the adoption of deadly white nationalist and antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Ohio ($99.6M) has seen the highest level of spending on nativist attack ads, with neighboring Pennsylvania ($89M) closely behind both, more than doubling Texas ($38M) the state with the next largest spend. The massive amounts of money dumped onto the Rust Belt on nativist attacks paints an interesting picture of where and how the GOP hopes to pull out a victory next month.
The next seven states that have seen the highest anti-immigrant TV ad spend from Republican-aligned campaigns are as follows: Arizona $30.8M, Montana $28.5M, Wisconsin $23.7M, Missouri $23.3M, North Carolina $22M, Indiana $21.6M, and Nevada $16.3M.
The TV ad spend is of course, just one metric of the total paid communication budgets of these campaigns. The breakdown of the spending per issue on digital media platforms is a labor-intensive project outside of our capacity, but we have identified over 3,052 unique Facebook ads that mentioned immigration from federal or statewide campaigns so far this cycle. Also, our extensive tracking of campaign emails and other digital platforms on X and Google suggest a similar emphasis on the nativist attack ads. Meaning that we can confidently say they have spent well over a billion dollars on nativist attack ads this cycle.
Mass deportation is their economic plan
Republicans’ economic message to working Americans is to blame the immigrants for all their economic troubles. Trump’s dismissal of public opinion in Wisconsin is telling, but for the Trump/Vance campaign and many down the ticket, their core economic message runs straight through their nativism. Nowhere is this clearer than the Republicans arguing the lie that mass deportation is the answer to the urgent concern of affordable housing. This nativist disinformation is a core part of the GOP’s closing message.
An ad from the main superPAC of GOP House leadership, the Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF), in the battleground district in Maine perfectly illustrates the cynical strategic nativism. The ad depicts a white woman as a pizza delivery driver who says she works 60-hours a week but still has to live with her father, telling voters, “you can't get an apartment by yourself anymore.” An enraging story, to be sure. A story about low wages and the lack of unions in the industry. A story about high rents and lack of affordable housing. A story that is all too familiar for millions of Americans facing real challenges that political leaders should be seeking to address. Tragically, the ad just pushes the lie that Democrats are “giving free housing to illegal immigrants.” No real solutions to address the challenges the woman puts on the table in the ad. Instead, the unstated ‘solution’ is found in the mass explosion of our immigrant neighbors as the nativist magic fix.
Their signature policy issue, mass deportation, is a major economic plan, just one that would devastate the economy for working people far beyond the effects on the housing market. All in order to fulfill Trump’s eugenics desire for gene and blood purity.
But the details of their mass deportation policy are politically radioactive outside the MAGA base. A new University of Maryland poll of battleground states adds to a growing body of research that reveals as much. They actually went beyond the generic “do you support or oppose mass deportation?” common to so many pollsters. Instead, they laid out specific details of the Trump/Vance plan:
“Undertake a program of mass deportation throughout the country, with the goal of finding, detaining and deporting most or all of the 11 million people who have been living in the US without legal status. States would be asked to use their local law enforcement or National Guard, and the Federal government may use the military. Large facilities would be built to hold people who have been detained. The cost would be $100 billion or more.”
They find "just 24-30% in the swing states prefer mass deportation." Which is probably why Trump and Vance have repeatedly been running from the details of their agenda and why all the ads look to hide the idea behind dog-whistles and disinformation.
General nativist zero-sum attacks about Democrats,' like the line about “billions in handouts to illegals,” is not new to this cycle but remains a consistent part of the disinformation drumbeat that immigrants are a parasitic drain on the nation. The reality of course, is quite the opposite, with immigration essential for the short and long term prosperity of the nation. Immigrant workers’, with and without status, tax contributions to critical programs like Social Security and Medicare are vital for the continued solvency of those programs. As a recent piece in Bloomberg noted, undocumented workers “contributed $22.6 billion to Social Security and $5.7 billion to Medicare, government programs that they help sustain but from which they draw no benefits.” But as Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, who is up for reelection in Missouri, lies to voters in a closing TV ad:
“Social security. It's a promise from generations before us. You paid into it. You earned it. I'm Josh Hawley, and I'll always fight to protect it. But Lucas Kunce has a different plan. He'd give amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants, letting them draw down on Social Security without paying their fair share.”
Hawley’s ad is indicative of the argument coming from the Party that has repeatedly sought to curtail Social Security and Medicare benefits – ‘purging our immigrant neighbors is the only way to keep the critical benefits.’
“They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime”
The notorious racist line delivered in Trump's announcement speech nearly a decade ago remains a core part of Republicans’ billion-dollar nativist campaign. To believe the dog-whistle fiction in the ads, every American should fear they “may not be able to survive the night” from the non-white immigrant lurking behind every corner. The false conflation of immigrants and crime is an old and dangerous lie, as Trump reminded us last week with his eugenist comments falsely asserting that the propensity for murder and crime was in the “genes” of immigrants. The ads are a bit more subtle than the reflexive biological racism from the top Republican. However, the strategic nativism that seeks to motivate voters through bigoted fears of inherent immigrant criminality makes up a sizable chunk of the billion-dollar investment.
A core element of this message is the lie that immigrants are responsible for the opioid overdose crisis in America, particularly from fentanyl. A seriously urgent problem, but one that is entirely divorced from immigration. Harsh immigration crackdowns will do nothing to stem the problem. Indicative of this attack is a new ad from the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) that exploits the heart-wrenching testimony of a woman who lost her brother to a fentanyl overdose to be able to sell the nativist lie to voters. The woman argues that the Democratic candidate “voted against border security and that has dire consequences for North Carolina. I lost a brother to the fentanyl crisis. So it's very personal and very dear to me that the border be closed.” The woman giving the testimony, alongside all Americans, deserve solutions, but they won’t come in the form of nativist restrictions. The white supremacist prison gangs trafficking the illicit drugs, the major US banks laundering money from foreign criminal organizations, and the billion-dollar pharmaceutical executives who got rich flooding communities and towns with pills are much better and more accurate targets for directing this rage.
White nationalist conspiracies and ugly dehumanization
$46 million of the campaign strategy has been running TV ads that push the white nationalist conspiratorial rhetoric about a so-called migrant invasion. This replacement theory lie has inspired multiple deadly domestic terrorist attacks from Pittsburgh to El Paso and Buffalo. This life was the justification for these deadly attacks and Republican-aligned campaigns have spent tens of millions of dollars blasting that lie through the television sets of millions of Americans.
One of the more recent vile standouts is a seven-figure ad buy from a Josh Hawley-aligned superPAC, Show Me Strong. The ominous voiceover in the ad warns
“When you look at a map, you see that countries have borders, America used to have a border, they kept us safe. But now the Democrats in Washington have destroyed it, allowing our country to be invaded by criminals, drugs and terrorists”
The ads white nationalist conspiratorial message is accompanied by an animated image that has black sludge consuming and overtaking all of Mexico as the black sludge moves to encompass all of the United States. The racist message It's quite loud for anyone not actively looking to find some sort of plausible deniability of the dangerous racism animating the ad.
There are serious and urgent concerns about the effects of a billion-dollar-plus effort distributing nativist messaging will have on our nation. Particularly as one part of the nativist narrative has already inspired a pattern of deadly domestic terrorist attacks and seeks to lay the foundation for undermining American democracy. Nor did this year just fall out of a coconut tree. Republicans and their allies have been advancing their nativist populism relentlessly for the last four years. Steadily pushing the boundaries of acceptable rhetoric toward dehumanizing and bigoted extremes. From a “border crisis” to a border “invasion” to a blood and soil nationalism where the immigrants are poisoning the gene pool and are patsies of a globalist plot to steal the election. This year’s electoral message from Republicans comes from the steady call and response from leaders and their base in a mass radicalization over the last several years, where the signature issue this year is rounding up people in detention camps to begin a mass purge of our immigrant neighbors.
The purge of the permanent, parasitic foreigner is the Republicans argument for the most pressing concerns facing working families. It’s a lie that will make the lives of the working people who remain exponentially worse. But it is their argument. One that they have spent years and billions of dollars to sell to the American people.
Setting aside for a moment what that means for the long-term fabric of the nation the immediate question raised is, will it work? Will the majority of the American people be convinced to make the turn towards neonationalism? The short answer is no. The longer and more complex answer will develop over the coming weeks and months, but Trump and the politics he represents will not receive the majority of votes. The distribution of those votes may still deliver a win to Trump through the electoral college, but we can confidently predict that the ugly nativist populism he has campaigned on will be rejected by the majority of the American people.
How narrow the race remains and the massive investment into nativism from the GOP does suggest interesting trends of public sentiment but not the ones fixated on by conventional wisdom. Yes, there has been movement from some Democrat-leaning voters towards a more restrictive immigration position. However, this is the least interesting or revealing part of the public opinion research. We have long been skeptical of the relevance of this trend, which we have repeatedly written about in greater detail. In short, their three factors that are revealed in a read of the data beyond the headlines that make this a less interesting story: (1) if Trump does win his radical mass deportation agenda will dramatically snap opinion in the opposite direction, (2) Democrat-leaning voters may be expressing concerns but its not the issue motivating their votes, and (3) the preference for legal pathways including citizenship remain exceedingly high and overwhelmingly wins out when pitted against mass deportation.
The more interesting story here is the radicalization of the Republican Party. Look at any of the data more closely, and the shift towards harsh immigration restriction is most pronounced amongst Republican-leaning voters. The call and response between the massive increase in nativist attack ads and the stark increase in Republican voters reporting immigration as their top issue dwarf the numbers on the Democratic side. More money, more dehumanization, and more salience on the Republican side of the ledger is where the story of immigration in this election is playing out. The question isn’t one of persuasion but rather of doubling down a nativist mobilization strategy, hoping that more money and extremism will deliver a different result at the ballot box.
All of the receipts we have collected over the years suggest it’s a bad billion-dollar political investment as they continue to sink money into a failing venture with a gold-plated Trump logo plastered out front. And it is probably why they’re so bought into the next venture, selling the Big Lie 2.0, hoping this nativist conspiracy theory will allow them to ever have to settle up the overdue bill.