Since beginning to run for president, Kamala Harris has been trying to distance herself from her record as an enthusiastic open-border advocate. So far, it's not working.
The latest CNN poll shows Trump with a comfortable 49-36 edge as the candidate better able to handle the border. But that's an improvement from Biden's numbers in July when Trump enjoyed a 30-point advantage on the issue.
When Harris was a senator, she criticized many Trump policies that Biden has adopted, which finally brought border crossings down from the catastrophic levels they were last spring.
As a born-again border warrior, Harris's newfound zeal for border security is being embraced by the entire Democratic Party. This gigantic game of "pretend" is being lapped up by major media who seem to have forgotten the 2 1/2 years of illegal aliens pouring across the border. More than 8 million people flooded the Southern border, overwhelming the undermanned Border Patrol, whose primary mission to protect Americans from drugs, traffickers, and terrorists fell by the wayside. The agents became bureaucrats, processing illegal aliens so they could enter the country.
Kamala Harris will visit the southern border on Friday to highlight the "progress" made in reducing the number of people coming into the country. Joe Biden and Harris have been forced by political pressure to adopt policies that Donald Trump had in place for most of his presidency. Biden scuttled most of them on his first day in office.
Trump said on Thursday, "Anything she says tomorrow, you know, is a fraud because she was the worst in history at protecting our country. So she’ll try and make herself look a little bit better. But it’s not possible."
After embracing progressive immigration policies in recent years, the Democratic Party—and not just Harris—has shifted to the right on the issue, with polls showing a majority of Americans now support curbing immigration for the first time in nearly two decades.
In Arizona—the swing state where, some polls suggest, she has the most ground to make up on Trump — Harris is expected to emphasize tougher border restrictions implemented by President Biden earlier this year that brought illegal border crossings to their lowest point since the pandemic.
Democrats have argued on the campaign trail that they are the party of solutions on immigration after Republicans walked away from a bipartisan Senate border compromise earlier this year, and Biden issued a policy attempting to mimic the compromise through executive action. Harris has said she would push Congress to revive the bipartisan bill.
That bipartisan border bill only came about at all because Joe Biden realized that if he didn't at least make an effort to control the flow of illegals pouring into the country, he could never win re-election. The bill was crafted by a small, ad-hoc committee of senators with no input from most Republican lawmakers. In a non-election year, it might have had a chance of being "better than nothing." But in an election year, it was doomed from the start.
“We are in a wildly better place than we were nine or 10 months ago,” said Lanae Erickson, a vice president at Third Way, a center-left Washington think tank advising Democrats to talk more about immigration. “If we can continue to talk about it and fight this issue to a draw, then we can win the election on other issues people care about.”
That's wishful thinking. The economy is the number one issue that voters say they care about. Trump still leads Harris by 8 points on the economy and 5 points on inflation. Along with the border, those are the three issues voters say they care about most, and Trump leads on all of them.
Since replacing Biden atop the Democrats' 2024 ticket more than two months ago, Harris has described herself as a former "border state prosecutor" who took on international gangs and criminal organizations behind illegal drug, gun and human trafficking across the border.
The description comes as Harris and her campaign have also spotlighted a tougher stance on border security while still pushing for a pathway to citizenship for some migrants.
"We need a comprehensive plan," Harris said Wednesday in an interview with MSNBC. "That includes what we need to do to fortify not only our border but deal with the fact that we also need to create pathways for people to earn citizenship."
Border security and giving illegals a path to citizenship are different, unrelated issues. Harris is trying to put a square peg into a round hole on the border and immigration, and the only reason it has a chance of working is because the media has experienced a collective amnesia about her previous border policies.
