Trump and GOP Candidates Brandish Race and Immigration to Sway Close Election

President Donald Trump on Monday sharply intensified a Republican campaign to frame the midterm elections as a battle over immigration and race, issuing a dark and factually baseless warning that “unknown Middle Easterners” were marching toward the U.S. border with Mexico.

The unsubstantiated charge marked an escalation of Trump’s efforts to stoke fears about foreigners and crime before the Nov. 6 vote, as he did to great effect in the presidential race. Trump and other Republicans are insistently seeking to tie Democrats to unfettered immigration and violent crime, and in some instances this summer and fall they have attacked minority candidates in nakedly racial terms.

Trump is now railing daily in speeches and on Twitter against the migrant caravan moving north through Central America, and on Monday called it a national emergency. The caravan has dominated conservative talk radio and Fox News, where there has also been loose speculation about a link to terrorism. The apparently groundless inclusion of “unknown Middle Easterners” to the caravan echoes Trump’s long-standing practice of amplifying fears about Islamic militants on the campaign trail.

In targeting the caravan, the president appears determined to end the election season with a cultural fight over national identity rather than the issues that party leaders initially wanted to run on, like tax cuts or the economy.

But Trump has not been alone in seeking to divide the electorate along racial lines this fall: As the congressional elections have approached, a number of Republican candidates and political committees have delivered messages plainly aimed at stoking cultural anxiety among white voters and even appealing to overt racism.

In upstate New York, Republican political groups have aired ads branding a Democratic congressional candidate, Antonio Delgado, who is black, as a “big-city rapper” and accusing him of seeking to give government “handouts” to food-stamp recipients. In Dallas, a political committee aligned with Trump, America First Action, has disseminated an online ad branding Colin Allred, a black civil rights lawyer, as hostile to gun rights — accompanied by the image of a white woman with a dark-skinned hand smothering her mouth.

Two House Republicans, Chris Collins of New York and Duncan Hunter of California, who have been indicted on charges of corruption, have aired ads widely denounced as racist. Hunter has branded his Democratic opponent, Ammar Campa-Najjar, who is Arab-American, a “security risk,” while Collins has run an ad showing his Democratic challenger, Nate McMurray, who is white, speaking Korean, insinuating that he favors Asian economic interests over those of the United States.

And in a debate in Florida on Sunday, Andrew Gillum, the Democratic mayor of Tallahassee who could become the state’s first black governor, criticized his Republican opponent, Ron DeSantis, for attempting to “draw all the attention he can to the color of my skin.”

DeSantis and his associates have been rebuked repeatedly for racially incendiary comments: In August, DeSantis said Florida should not “monkey this up” by electing Gillum — a comment he described as a normal figure of speech — and one of his chief surrogates nicknamed the Democrat “Andrew Kill-'em,” purportedly alluding to Tallahassee’s crime rate.

Most pervasive have been broad and largely false claims that Democrats support an “open borders” immigration policy that would lead to a vast influx of violent crime. Republicans have deployed that charge in countless elections, and are now linking mainstream Democrats who support immigration reforms to far-left activists who favor abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Republicans are also accusing Democrats, without evidence, of going soft on MS-13, a Latin American gang that Trump regularly depicts as a national menace.

The approach taken by Trump and like-minded Republicans contrasts starkly with the way Democrats have campaigned in 2018, and with how Republican congressional leaders had originally vowed to approach the midterms. Democratic candidates have tended to downplay immigration as a theme, focusing instead on a small number of kitchen-table issues, chiefly health care.

After a campaign stop in Florida on Monday, Joe Biden, the former vice president who is mulling a run for the presidency in 2020, criticized Trump’s ferocity on the migrant issue.

“The caravan is 2,000 miles away. He’s making it sound like they’re breaking through the border. This is hysteria on his part. Let it calm down,” Biden said.

When asked whether Republicans were trying to win the midterms with racial appeals, Biden shot back, “They are because that’s who they are.” Republicans have often reached for divisive racial and cultural issues when the political tide has appeared to be against them, branding Democratic candidates in a series of offseason elections as soft on immigration and crime. A study published last week by the Wesleyan Media Project found that health care was the dominant subject in 2018 campaign advertising, but that about an eighth of Republican campaign commercials also discussed immigration — more than double the share for Democratic ads.

Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and occasional Trump adviser, said immigration could be a more potent issue than the economy. “The caravan is an existential moment,” he said.

Citing polls showing a strong majority of the country opposes illegal immigration, Gingrich argued, “That’s a lot bigger margin than you’re going to get in the near future on Trump’s economic policy.”

Ali Noorani, head of the National Immigration Forum, a nonpartisan advocacy group that favors comprehensive immigration reform, said there was little surprise that Trump would ultimately steer Republicans this way, rather than focusing on economic themes.

“We fully expected the president to place a big bet on an anti-immigrant message as we got closer and closer to the midterms,” Noorani said. “If there’s a surprise, it’s that he’s not talking about Kavanaugh or the economy as much as I expected.”

But Noorani said Republicans face a trade-off: “Is that going to be a message that turns off independent voters?”

Much of the harshest advertising around immigration and race has come in conservative-leaning, relatively homogeneous districts where Republican incumbents are gravely endangered. For lawmakers like Collins and Rep. John Faso of New York, who faces Delgado, the most likely chance for re-election depends on the strong support of conservative whites.

Delgado said in an interview Monday that he did not believe voters would accept what he described as Republicans’ “grotesque misrepresentation” of his biography and beliefs. He acknowledged that the crude negativity of the attacks came as a shock.

“I didn’t expect this,” Delgado said. “I think this is divisive, and this is ugly, and I think it has no place in our politics.”

Polls suggest close races in the districts held by Faso and Collins, as well as the Dallas-area seat where Allred is running against Rep. Pete Sessions.

But it is not clear how Trump-style rhetoric about immigration and race might be received across the wider expanse of the midterm map, which covers affluent suburban districts, diverse cities and rural areas with important Latino communities — all areas that have tended to reject Trump’s harsh nationalism. While opposition to illegal immigration runs strong, a poll published Sunday by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal found voters trusted Democrats slightly more than Republicans on the overall immigration issue. The caravan — a group estimated to comprise some 7,000 people making its way through Mexico — is the latest focal point for Trump and his ideological allies. The story has permeated conservative media in recent days, amplified by figures like Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan, and a long lineup of Fox News personalities. Some conservative outlets, like WND.com, which regularly peddle conspiracy theories, have pushed false claims that the caravan includes Islamic terrorists and suggested — again, baselessly — that liberal investor George Soros might be financing the expedition.

Trump and other Republicans hope that the image of thousands of migrants seeking to enter the country will further energize his political base, which is predominantly made up of lower-income white voters who are generally suspicious of immigration.

Steve Bannon, the immigration hard-liner who advised Trump in the White House, said Republicans were nationalizing the midterm election around themes that electrify the right. Bannon likened it to the end of the 2016 election, when Trump “came alive in the last few weeks of that campaign, and closed hard.”

Right now, Bannon said, “Trump’s grassroots base is united and on fire.” There is precedent for red-state voters rewarding Republicans for racially inflammatory rhetoric, including in the 2014 midterm elections. But last year, voters in Virginia handed Republicans a punishing defeat after their nominee for governor, Ed Gillespie, spent much of his campaign linking Democrats to MS-13 and lenient immigration policies.

Justin Fairfax, Virginia’s lieutenant governor, who won a landslide victory in 2017 to become the state’s second-ever black constitutional officer, said Republicans there had attempted to walk a “very dark political road,” as Trump is doing now.

“Americans are rejecting that dark vision,” said Fairfax, a Democrat, adding, “What we showed in Virginia is, not only would they lose, but they would lose in historic proportions.”

In Nevada on Monday, former President Barack Obama alluded at an early-voting rally to the Republican campaign, telling Democrats that the GOP would be trying to “appeal to tribe” and “pit one group against the other” over the next two weeks. But there was little expectation among voters there that Trump might change course.

It was in the same state last week, after all, that Trump claimed falsely that there had been riots against illegal immigration in California.

“This is what they do,” said Reese Williams, a 49-year-old veteran, of Trump’s party. “These are the cards they pull all the time.”

But Trump’s dystopian imagery has clearly left an impression with some. Carol Shields, 75, a Republican in northern Minnesota, said she was afraid that migrant gangs could take over people’s summer lake homes in the state.

“What’s to stop them?” said Shields, a retired accountant. “We have a lot of people who live on lakes in the summer and winter someplace else. When they come back in the spring, their house would be occupied.”