The Washington Post analyzed the transcripts, images and on-screen text featured in more than 700 campaign ads that mention immigration and that ran from January through June for the presidential and Senate races, as well as congressional primaries and major state campaigns.
Taken as a whole, the ads convey an unrealistic portrait of the border as being overrun and inaccurately characterize immigrants generally as a threat, of which there is little evidence.
FBI data show U.S. border cities are among the nation’s safest. And a 2023 report from a group of economists found immigrants are at
least 30 percent less likely to be incarcerated than U.S.-born individuals.
Republicans have made issues at the border central to their attacks on Harris in her effort to win the White House, dubbing her the “border czar” of the Biden administration and blaming her for crimes committed by immigrants. As vice president, she was directed by President Joe Biden to tackle the enduring root causes of unauthorized immigration. She, however, was never put in charge of the border nor labeled a “czar.”
Democrats ran a little more than three dozen ads about immigration, compared with almost 700 for Republicans. Of those ads, the most widely aired connected the issue of migration with calls to secure the border or crack down on fentanyl and violent crime. In the ads for Democrats, few showed migrants near a border.
While candidates have more options than ever before to get their messages to voters, television ad spending still ranks high on the list of expenditures. “If campaigns didn’t believe ads can matter, they wouldn’t be spending millions on buying time to air them,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center.