We have a fundamental problem with election campaigning. In modern politics, every issue solved is one less issue to campaign on.
In recent years, both the Democrat and Republican parties have partially fixed issues but intentionally failed to resolve them completely because that becomes one less thing to complain about on the campaign trail. Rather than showing where the issue remains unresolved, it may be worth seeing the response when the issue is resolved.
Immigration was a hot topic for most of the 2010s and the first half of the 2020s. Joe Biden’s administration deliberately failed to secure the Southern border after the election, causing a major border crisis. Border towns were overrun with illegal immigrants. American citizens living just north of the border were hearing migrants knocking on their windows, asking for water and directions. Worse, crime went up.
As a result, the GOP got a major boost going into the 2022 and 2024 elections. The Biden administration gave Republicans ammunition to win majorities in places many thought impossible. Starr County, a border county that normally votes blue, gave Donald Trump a majority in 2024 almost entirely because of border concerns.
But migrants don’t seem to boost the GOP’s election chances anymore, ironically because Trump has been so successful. During his second term, Trump solved the border crisis. The U.S.-Mexico border is no longer ground zero for millions of migrants. The border towns that were overrun by illegals are now at peace. The crisis that affected millions on the southern border is a thing of the past.
That should be a huge win for the Trump administration, and it is. It took the president mere months to resolve a major crisis plaguing our nation. Unfortunately, campaigns and the electorate see it another way.
Most campaigners, especially at the state and national level, argue that change is needed, and for that reason you should vote for this candidate. Few candidates run on the platform that everything is great and we should strive to maintain what we have. Strangely, that is a far less effective campaign mantra.
The bigger problem when it comes to immigration is the PR trouble ICE has faced. While officials and agents do their job well, the optics, combined with the media portrayal, have been poor. ICE has become so unpopular that New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is now educating illegal immigrants in Spanish on how to defend themselves against immigration law enforcement. He will likely get away with it too. The lack of change offered by the Right, contrasted with the anti-ICE movement on the Left, has swung the momentum on the immigration issue back to the Left.
The media has taken this narrative and run with it as well. Recently, CBS cherry-picked the biggest illegal migrant sob story reporters could find, and put him on “60 Minutes.” The guy cried a lot and appeared as sympathetic as possible, completely misrepresenting the reality about real illegal migrants. In fact, CBS left unreported the real story — that the “Texas father” in question lied about his reasons for seeking asylum (a phony claim to be gay), leaving him open to justified deportation. It’s quite telling that CBS featured the guy’s wife while neglecting his “gay” claim.
Back to the broader picture on immigration, the point is this: Many voters are no longer concerned about immigration because immigration isn’t a problem anymore. They won’t care about the good the current government has done because those issues are things of the past. Instead, they are concerned about the issues that Leftmedia dangles in their faces, such as the economy, the war with Iran, and ICE. The Left has hammered those issues time and again, with great success.
Unfortunately, the GOP can’t use a similar strategy, since it has largely fixed this major issue the Biden administration created. And at the end of the day, the message of “we need to fix this” will almost always beat “we fixed this.”
