The GOP has Spent $350 Million + on Nativist TV Ads, Will it Deliver at the Ballot Box?

Republican campaigns have already spent $352 million on negative immigration TV and CTV ads so far this year, according to data compiled from AdImpact. These nativist ads make up 47% of all the TV/CTV ad spend from Republican campaigns this year. That’s $100 million more than the total spend on anti-immigrant ads from all of the 2022 midterms and up $300 million from 2020. It’s data that is illustrative of the GOP’s commitment to demagoguing immigrants as their central electoral strategy, an ugly strategy epitomized by one of Trump’s recent strategic racist posts on social media that made the rounds this week. 

But it’s not just the spending and it’s not the sort of ugly we have seen from Trump and his allies before. This cycle, the rhetoric has gotten more dehumanizing and extreme to the point where the white nationalist and antisemitic replacement theory, which has inspired multiple deadly terrorist attacks, has become the beating heart of their message. Look no further than the use of replacement theory rhetoric in the very first bullet point of the Republican Platform to note its centrality. Republicans have also spent over $39 million just on TV/CTV ads that use the “invasion,” rhetoric that is inexorably tied to the bigoted conspiracy. That is an 8-fold increase over all of 2022. 

Peppered with other disinformation narratives, the nativist fiction the Republicans are trying to sell voters generally goes:

‘Democrats are radicals who have intentionally flung open our borders, fueling the opioid epidemic and allowing an invasion of criminal illegals, many from prisons and mental hospitals, who threaten your families, take your jobs, and are getting a free ride at your expense so that Democrats can steal elections by turning them into voters, polluting the ballot box with fraudulent immigrant votes.’ 

The idea that desperate people fleeing for their lives looking for safety in the United States either constitutes a literal military invasion or are part of some plot to steal the election is absurd, but it is nevertheless the Republicans’ argument this year. Crime is also down, there is no “migrant crime” wave, but Republicans have spent at least $92 million on crime/immigration ads. Immigrants are essential to a thriving economy, and are not “taking jobs.” The opioid crisis is urgent but has nothing to do with migration and Republican rhetoric threatens to make the crisis worse. Republicans have spent at least $51 million on ads about fentanyl and illicit drugs in immigration-related ads, with $32 million explicitly mentioning fentanyl.    

It is important to note that the goal of this over a quarter of a billion dollar investment is not to advance a policy discussion about how to manage the challenges of global migration but to provide a vehicle to agitate anxieties around safety, material security, and identity with coded racist appeals as part of a strategy to win political power. 

With that power, Republicans have been crystal clear, even if they are less forthcoming on the details, that they will enact a mass deportation agenda that will create a show-me-your-papers force to separate American families, deport Dreamers, and wreck the economy for working people. Evidenced by those at the RNC enthusiastically waving “mass deportation now” signs last month, the plan is the Republicans’ signature campaign issue this cycle. Following the replacement theory line in the Republican Party platform, the commitment to mass deportation took the second slot. 

As we have mentioned here before, the campaign promise of mass deportation is different this time. There is a plan, a will to see it through, and little in the way of impediments to stopping Trump and the GOP if given access to power.     

Leaked recordings obtained by CNN of Russ Vought, the former top Trump administration official and a central figure in Project 2025, emphasizes the commitment to the mass deportation plan. “Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies,” Vought said, including “thinking through how the deportation would work.” They go on to characterize a part of Vought’s conversation on the tapes:

“For example, ‘you may say, ‘OK, all right, DHS, we want to have the largest deportation,’’ Vought said. ‘What are your actual memos that a secretary sends out to do it? Like, there’s an executive order, regulations, secretarial memos. Those are the types of things that need to be thought through so you’re not, you’re not having to scramble or do that later on.’”

Said another way, Vought is admitting on these tapes that he is just as much as a white nationalist weirdo as Stephen Miller, who spends so much of their time dedicated to how they can deport a second-grade teacher with DACA, a home healthcare aid with TPS, or the undocumented worker (maybe working on J.D. Vance’s or Trump’s exploitative ventures) who has been locked out of a path to legal status but has been calling the US home for the last decade.     

Interestingly, despite all the dedicated time spent on how they would execute their signature mass deportation pledge, none of the $350 million in ads mention the details of the plan. And even as Trump, Vance, and their allies eagerly brag about pulling off the “largest deportation operation in American history,” Trump avoided the specifics of the question in his debate with Biden. Mass deportation is their major policy proposal and the “solution” to the “problem” they are spending a fortune to convince the American people to believe. Yet, very few questions have been put to Republicans about what this plan would actually entail.

The idea for some Republicans has raised serious concerns. Others, like Sen. Lankford (R-OK) and Rep. Salazar (R-FL), would like us to buy into their deranged logic that there isn’t a need to fret about supporting Republicans at the ballot box because they will moderate and abandon their signature campaign once in power. That they won't actually carry out the mass deportation program they promise.  

The downplaying by the few Republicans who have asked about the specifics and the lack of forthcoming details might be an outgrowth of the vulnerabilities clearly in the numbers for anyone bothering to look.

Greg Sargent noted in a recent piece for The New Republic, that a new poll of Latino voters in battleground states conducted by BSP Research found Harris leading Trump 55-37% among these voters and support for the balanced approach. Suggesting that the GOP message of mass deportation is more about radicalization of their base than one of persuasion of the middle. 

Numerous other polls, including one from Marquette University and our own internal polling, found that when voters were exposed to the basic details about how the GOP mass deportation plan would target the law-abiding, long-settled community,  support dramatically drops by over 10 to 16 points.   

Moreover, voters overwhelmingly support legalization and pathways to citizenship over mass deportation. A recent Gallup poll found that voters supported citizenship at 23 points higher than mass deportations, with support jumping another 11 points to 81% when it was citizenship for Dreamers. Another recent poll by GSG of battleground states found 69-31% support for legalization over mass deportation. When given the choice between the two sides – pathways to legalization or mass deportation – even a sizable segment of Republican base voters some 30% supported legalization, according to the GOP presidential primary exit polls earlier this year.  

Apparently terrified of the backlash on their radically vindictive policies like mass deportation, those aligned with the Republican Party would rather you not know their plan to raid the local grade school with the National Guard troops to fill up massive detention camps as part of their designs on an authoritarian nationalist state. As Ross Vought said behind closed doors, their plans will not be made public and instead will be a “very, very close hold.”  

But looking at the polls, it's no surprise these little weirdos are trying to squirrel away their plans from public view. They are unpopular, cruel ideas that are more concerned with the purity of the blood of the American people than the wallets of American families. They are willing to sacrifice the latter for the former.

Far from great, the mass deportation plan would make America desolate. It's long past time Republicans up and down the ticket are held to account for the plan they have so enthusiastically championed.  

The honest answer to the question posed in the headline is we don’t know for sure one way or the other. No crystal ball here. But the electoral strategy of aggressive, xenophobic demagoguery has failed at the ballot box for Republicans in cycle after cycle in recent years. It failed to deliver in 2017, 2018, 2020, and 2022. 

 The notion that the GOP has a shot at electoral wins while putting a white nationalist and antisemitic conspiracy theory at the heart of their campaign is disturbing, but also the hard truth of the matter. However, their aggressive nativism has repeatedly failed, and if their signature promise of mass deportation is made toxic, that pattern is more likely to continue. 

As Ed Kilgore recently wrote for New York Magazine, “Republicans Will Regret Calling for Mass Deportations,”: 

“The first real stirrings of a new right-wing rebellion against Establishment Republicanism began in sharp grassroots reaction to ‘amnesty’ proposals from George W. Bush and John McCain to provide a path to citizenship for most undocumented immigrants. McCain was forced to all but repudiate his own long-standing position on the subject in order to nail down the GOP nomination in 2008. And then in 2012, the allegedly moderate Mitt Romney used a tough line on immigration to outflank conservative rivals like Rick Perry and Rick Santorum. By the time Trump began running for president with his birtherist attacks on Obama as an alleged alien, Romney’s encouragement of ‘self-deportation’ was already looking a bit too mild for his party … Sooner — perhaps before the 2024 elections — or later, if mass deportation is actually attempted, Republicans will regret their current immigration bender. Perhaps the current reductions in border crossings or the emergence of other issues will turn down the red-hot pressure to push millions of people out of the United States. But if not, we could soon be experiencing scenes of violence and misery similar to what many of the country’s migrants came here seeking to flee.”

Recent research and messaging advice from Equis Research points towards a similar conclusion, writing a recently published massaging playbook:

“Specifically, calling out Trump’s plans to deport ‘millions of immigrants who have been living and working here for decades’ is an effective persuasion strategy.”

Messaging advice that Equis pulls from an August message test they conducted around the issue, writing: 

“Prioritize negative messaging on Trump’s immigration plans in both English and Spanish. The best testing messages continue to reference his plans to use the National Guard for large-scale raids that would deport millions of immigrants, including those who have been living and working in the US for decades.”