Harris hopes new playbook will neutralize GOP attacks on immigration – DNyuz

For weeks, Republicans have been attacking Vice President Kamala Harris on immigration, blaming her for President Biden’s policies at the border.

Now Ms. Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, is trying to neutralize that line of attack, one of her biggest weaknesses with voters. She is deploying a strategy that Democrats say has worked well in recent elections, taking her clearest stance yet as a tough prosecutor focused on securing the border.

This week, she has hit back, promising to improve border security if elected and criticizing her Republican opponent, former President Donald J. Trump, for helping to thwart a bipartisan border deal in Congress. And her campaign has reversed some of the more progressive positions she took during her bid for the Democratic nomination in 2019, including her position that migrants who cross the U.S. border without authorization should not face criminal penalties.

“I was attorney general of a border state,” Ms. Harris, once California’s top prosecutor, said Friday at a rally in Arizona, a swing state where immigration is a major concern for voters. “I went after the transnational gangs, the drug cartels, the human traffickers. I prosecuted them in case after case, and I won.”

A day earlier, Harris’s campaign released a television ad highlighting her turn. The ad, aimed at voters in swing states, promised that Ms. Harris would “hire thousands of additional border agents and crack down on fentanyl and human trafficking.” There was no mention of undocumented immigrants already in the United States — a top priority for many progressives and immigration activists — even though Ms. Harris, in her speech in Arizona, stressed the importance of “comprehensive reforms” that include “an earned path to citizenship.”

No Democratic candidate since Bill Clinton has taken such a tough stance on border security. Her stance reflects a shift in public opinion since Trump left the White House in 2021. More Americans, including many Democrats and Latino voters, have voiced support for tough immigration measures.

The shift in public opinion comes as Republicans have ramped up their anti-immigrant rhetoric. Border crossings soared during the Biden administration, though they have fallen sharply recently since an executive order by Biden restricting the border. The question for Ms. Harris is whether her new message as the party’s standard-bearer comes too late for voters who have already formed opinions about her record.

Senior Trump campaign officials have ranked immigration as one of Ms. Harris’s deepest vulnerabilities and have sought from the start to link her policies to those of Mr. Biden, calling her the “border czar.” The title overshadows the actual policy portfolio Mr. Biden gave her, which called for her to address the root causes of migration from Latin America.

Democratic pollsters have raised similar concerns about Ms. Harris’s immigration record. Blueprint, a Democratic group, recently tested six possible Republican lines of attack on Ms. Harris — including labeling her a “border czar” — and found that the lines on immigration were the most effective, even more effective than attacks on the economy and inflation.

Other polls have shown that voters have more confidence in Mr. Trump’s ability to handle border issues than in Ms. Harris’s. But if Ms. Harris can at least counter Republican arguments on immigration, she may be able to sway voters on issues that favor Democrats, such as abortion, her allies say.

The Harris campaign’s decision to portray her record as California’s attorney general as a “border state prosecutor” stands in contrast to the way she ran in the 2020 Democratic primary.

She then raised her hand during a debate in response to a question about whether people in the country illegally should have access to public health care.

Trump has attacked Ms. Harris in dark terms across the border, spreading fear about migrants and using dehumanizing language to falsely portray them as a threat to Americans.

“Kamala allows immigrant criminals to walk free every day to attack, rape, maim and murder our citizens,” the former president said Friday at a rally in Montana.

Chris DeRose, a Republican who served as a clerk in the Maricopa County courthouse in Arizona, said many swing voters would be skeptical of Ms. Harris’s rhetoric.

“She’s part of the Biden-Harris administration,” DeRose said. “There’s going to be some skepticism.”

But Ms. Harris and her allies have tried to turn Mr. Trump’s immigration record into a campaign issue of their own. This year, Mr. Trump convinced Senate Republicans to kill a bill backed by Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris that would have effectively ordered the border closed to migrants when numbers reached certain levels and vastly expanded detentions and deportations.

“Donald Trump ruined the deal,” Ms. Harris said in Arizona, as a crowd of more than 15,000 supporters booed. “Because he thought it would win him an election.”

Jen Cox, a senior adviser for the Harris campaign in Arizona, said Democrats in that state, including Sen. Mark Kelly, won the election with tougher messages on immigration.

“Voters want people to be serious about actually fixing the broken immigration system and securing the border,” Ms. Cox said in an interview. “They don’t want people to play politics with it.”

In a closely watched midterm election in New York this year, Tom Suozzi, a Democrat, won a close race for the House of Representatives. He criticized Trump for the failed border deal and took unusually tough stances for a member of his party, including calls to temporarily close the border and deport migrants who attack police.

“The most effective politician is the one who says what people are already thinking,” Mr. Suozzi said. “And people are talking about this problem. They are very concerned about it. And the vice president can continue to emphasize that we recognize that this is a problem and that we are willing to compromise to solve it, unlike the other side.”

Harris campaign officials say her shift to the center since the 2020 primaries was influenced by her time as vice president.

Mike Madrid, a GOP consultant who has long focused on Latino voters, said Ms. Harris’s pledge to sign the border security law, which does not include protections for undocumented immigrants already in the United States, and the security-focused message of her new television ad reflected broader changes among Democrats.

Since the Obama years, Democrats have tried to combine efforts to improve border security with calls to create permanent pathways to legal residency and citizenship for the roughly 10 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. Many of them have lived in the country for years, holding jobs, paying taxes and raising families.

But the Latin American electorate, the fastest-growing part of the voting bloc, now generally consists of third- and fourth-generation voters who are further removed from the immigration experience, Madrid said.

“This doesn’t mean you have to go all Donald Trump on immigration,” he said. “It means you have to start with border security and weave in elements of immigration reform later.”

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