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In the final days leading up to the US Alabama special election last December, President Trump touched on his favorite topic.
"We are going to have borders over borders," he said. A few months later, before a congressional special election in Pennsylvania, he proclaimed: "Democrats are the party of sanctuary cities. . . . They like to protect criminals. "
He returned there in August to Ohio, when he campaigned for a Republican in a special election of the House. "A vote for. . . the Democrats are a vote to let criminals and drugs run into our country, "he said.
Now it's the caravan.
During the last leg of each campaign since the beginning of his presidential effort in 2015, Trump has always taken up the subject of immigration, launching a anger, nativist appeal to his main supporters.
The current caravan gave him an evocative image of a group of immigrants heading slowly towards the border. He introduced the crowd as containing terrorists from the Middle East – potential terrorists – admitting later that there was "no evidence" of that.
On Thursday, his administration announced the dispatch of 800 soldiers to the border. The White House was also considering closing the border and denying Central Americans in the caravan the opportunity to seek legal asylum in the United States.
It is an attempt to dominate the conversation, to flood the airwaves in a manner that evokes an immediate threat, even though the immigrant group is still about 1,000 miles from the US border.
The White House has issued a daily call on the caravan, according to people familiar with the call, with representatives of the administration and Congress. Officials from the White House and the Republican Party also urged surrogates to go on television to talk about it.
The president himself has focused several times on the caravan.
"As we speak, the Democratic Party is openly encouraging illegal foreign caravans to violate our laws and to introduce them into our country," Trump said Wednesday night at a rally in New York. Wisconsin.
He also claimed that unnamed American cities are being released from violent immigrants and that the inhabitants of these anonymous cities are gathering at their windows to applaud US immigration officials.
"I tell you, it's like watching movies about the Second World War," he said. "It's like watching documentaries about the First and Second World Wars. The occupations, they have them, they take them out, and the people are at their windows, they applaud and howl and they are happy. "
Until now, the president is fighting a unilateral battle. Most Democrats choose not to engage, preferring to focus on health care, which they say is more important for voters.
The Democratic group American Bridge sent Thursday an e-mail aimed at attracting attention with the subject "Kanye traveling to the caravan". But the body of this email was about Republicans and their pre-existing health.
"I have to be honest, as an advocate for immigration, I think most Democrats are smart and do not get caught up in Trump and stay true to the problem. [it] race after race, "said Frank Sharry, executive director of America's Voice's pro-immigrant voice. "In the rough calculation of the homestretch policy, do you want to debate Trump on a caravan far away from 1,000 miles, or 130 million Americans with pre-existing conditions that could lose their protections?"
"It is not necessary to enter into an in-depth debate on immigration policy at this point, two weeks before the mid-session," he added. "Trump just wants to demagogue the question."
Democrats and immigration advocates point to evidence of the limitations of Trump's basic appeal. Many of the candidates for whom he had campaigned in previous elections have been lost. During the 2017 Virginia governorship race, Republican candidate Ed Gillespie also turned to immigration in the last weeks of the campaign, attempting to link the MS-gang violence with 13 to the vote of Democratic candidate Ralph Northam against the ban on sanctuary cities.
"We were a little frustrated with him," Sharry said of Northam. "Why does not he talk about immigration, damn it?" But he stayed true to his "I am a doctor who cares about health care and I will stick to that and be as boring as possible". "
He won by 9 points.
Trump told White House counselors that immigration is an issue on which Democrats have "no message, whatever," in the words of a senior House official white.
"It's a good message because the contrast is simple," said the senior official.
Republicans consider the general issue of immigration as a powerful issue throughout the country, which can motivate Trump supporters, especially white men, and scare the independents. They ran ads in sanctuary cities of Minnesota, Pennsylvania and California. In North Dakota, almost as far from the Mexican border as any other state, many Republican commercials involved sanctuary towns.
"This is an important factor," said Matt Gorman, a spokesperson for the Republican National Convention Committee. "Immigration – even before the caravan – was a problem that arose in the districts for months, including those that were not even near the border."
In a national poll conducted by Washington Post-ABC News in early January, 16% of registered voters considered immigration to be one of the most important issues in their vote. she trailed behind other issues such as the economy, health care and equal treatment between men and women.
Interviewees gave Democrats members of Congress an 11-point advantage over Trump over which they had more confidence in their ability to manage immigration. But Trump is doing better in border security. A poll conducted by Washington Post-Schar School in July revealed that Americans trusted Trump rather than the congressional Democrats, with a margin of 8 points when asked what was best for border security. Its advantage has risen to 17 points in the Congress's battlefield districts, which are more Republican.
"Border security is a real concern among voters and the caravan raises the issue at a very important time," said Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster. "And that has an impact because border security is already a problem in this election."
Republicans believe the argument is echoed in border states, including contests in Texas and Arizona.
In the Indiana campaign, Republican Mike Braun repeatedly points to Senator Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.) As "Mexico Joe" – a reference to a family-owned business that relies on Mexican labor – even when it comes to health care, economics or Iran's nuclear deal.
In Missouri, Republican candidate Josh Hawley cited the caravan as a way to portray Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill as reluctant to enforce border controls.
"This is the kind of weakness that invites this chaos, the national security crisis," he told Fox News. "That's what we can not afford."
Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) Took a step forward, joking that his Democratic opponent wants to be in charge of the caravan.
"A caravan is now walking north," said Cruz to his supporters on Saturday. "I'm just waiting to see Beto O'Rourke get off and start running the caravan."
O'Rourke on Wednesday denounced this kind of "paranoia and fear," saying that this propaganda spread just before the elections by "an administration that tries to scare us from each other".
"Do you want to be motivated by fear, paranoia – or are we the big bold and confident country that I know we are?", He said.
In some blue and purple states, the Democrats used the president's attention on the caravan to go on the offensive. On Tuesday evening, in the final debate on Colorado's governorship race, Democratic candidate Jared Polis asked a caravan question as an opportunity to tip the unpopular Trump government policy of separating immigrant families at the border. .
"There is a national emergency and it is an urgent matter of character," said Polis, a Boulder congressman, who had voted against the policy of separation. "It's an emergency when a 2-year-old is torn from his mother's arms and sent thousands of miles away. That's not what we are as a nation. "
Republican candidate Walker Stapleton, asked if members of the caravan would be "welcome" in Colorado, said they would not do it. But he said that he would not send the National Guard to the border if it was to separate families, and he said that he supported the legal status of the young immigrants brought to the United States by their parents.
"We lived in the state of Colorado with the federal government's inability to solve our immigration problems," Stapleton said. "I can not stand families who are separating. I support the "dreamers". I support those who contribute to the fabric of our state. "
Frank Luntz, a former Republican pollster who led many focus groups with voters, said the sentiments of both countries were poorly understood: Democrats underestimate the public's desire to strengthen border security, while Republicans underestimate his empathy for immigrants and their fate.
"I think Republicans have made a mistake by not focusing on the economy, frankly," said Luntz. "It may be less of a question of topicality, but it has a bigger impact on people's daily lives. I think that any repulsion for the economic success of the last two years is not good for Republicans. And that includes immigration and that includes the caravan. "
David Weigel and Scott Clement contributed to this report.
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