The Gaslighting Old Party: Lying to bring about fear is what they do. Long article, best read in the Post itself.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/election ... -security/
More than $247 million was spent in the first six months of this year on television, streaming platform and digital ads that mention immigration, according to AdImpact, which tracks campaign advertising. That is $40 million more than ads that mention any other issue.
Over 90 percent of the ads supported Republican candidates and were paid for by their campaigns or political action committees backing them.
The level of spending underscores how important Republicans view border security and immigration in this year’s elections. While polls show voters overall rank issues at the border as less important to them than the economy, inflation and protecting democracy, Republican voters consistently rank it as among the most important.
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.
The majority of spending — over 80 percent — went to ads that never aired in states that border Mexico. The states that saw the most money spent on immigration ads were Ohio, Indiana and Montana, which have immigrant populations well below the national average but also have high-stakes races.
Trump won all three of those states in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. And this year, all three had competitive Republicans primaries for statewide races. But Ohio and Montana are particularly important for both parties: They have two of the most hotly contested Senate races where Democratic incumbents are facing tough challenges that could determine which party controls the chamber.
Over a third of the 745 ads included depictions of Border Patrol, soldiers or the military, sometimes paired with calls to “declare war” on drug cartels.
Around 20 percent of the ads referred to migrants as “illegals” or “aliens,” with around 7 percent choosing harsher words like “trafficker,” “rapist,” or “murderer.”
And around 10 percent of the 745 ads referenced migrants as invaders or the influx of migrants as an invasion.
In contrast, just 2 percent included the words “asylum,” “refugee,” or “undocumented.” And almost all of the ads from Republicans and their aligned groups portrayed refugees or asylum seekers as dangerous threats to the country, attacking candidates for perceived support of them.
The Post analysis found that nearly 20 percent of the 745 ads use footage and photos that are outdated, lack context, or are paired with voice-overs and text that do not accurately depict what is shown on the screen.
Dozens of ads criticize the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the border, while showing chaotic scenes that were filmed in 2018 under the Trump administration. This video shows Central American migrants in Tijuana, Mexico, rushing the southern border. U.S. Border Patrol agents fired tear gas to repel the crowd, which included young children. The footage was taken during the Trump administration, but in dozens of ads, it is paired with voice-over and text tying it to Democrats. The Post reached out to the political action committees and campaigns that ran the ads shown below. None responded with a comment.
Nearly 30 percent of the ads mention cartels or drugs. MAGA Inc. and the National Republican Congressional Committee, as well as campaign committees supporting candidates in Virginia, South Carolina and Alabama, paid for ads that included visuals of cartels or anonymous gang members that are nearly a decade old; one shows a gang member interviewed by ABC News in El Salvador in 2016; another was from a 2015 book by photographer Adam Hinton that featured photographs he took in 2013 of gang members inside a prison in El Salvador.
The NRCC’s national press secretary, Will Reinert, responded to questions in a statement that didn’t address the outdated images. Instead, the statement pointed to Americans killed by migrants and said: “The Washington Post is running interference for the perpetrators instead of the victims. Pathetic.”
[PHOTOS]
These photographs of MS-13 prisoners in El Salvador were taken in 2013 and used in a 2024 ad that ran supporting Rep. Jerry L. Carl and attacking Rep. Barry Moore. The two Republicans faced each other in a primary after Alabama’s congressional map was redrawn, with Moore defeating Carl.
[VIDEO]
This video from 2016 of a gang member in El Salvador was used in a 2024 ad attacking Democrat Tom Suozzi of New York, who won back his congressional seat in a special election replacing Republican George Santos.
[AD]
An ad paid for by Indiana state Sen. Andy Zay used stock footage of masked men and a staged arrest scene.
The ad above paid for by Zay, who ran for Indiana’s 3rd Congressional District and lost, uses stock footage of masked and armed men and a table of drugs as the words “cartels” and “human traffickers” flash on screen, as well as stock footage of an arrest, with his voice-over touting his record of having “cracked down on fentanyl dealers.” The Post reached out to Zay’s and Carl’s campaign representatives. None responded with a comment.
These ads use outdated or stock images as evidence to present migrants as violent and posing a danger to Americans. When asked about the ads analyzed by The Post, Michelle Mittelstadt, director of communications for the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, said: “People would do well to remember they are seeing highly selected representations of immigration that are often filled with misinformation.”
In July, Trump accepted the GOP presidential nomination and stated: “At the heart of the Republican platform is our pledge to end this border nightmare, and fully restore the sacred and sovereign borders of the United States of America.”
The Post reported in February that illegal border crossings had soared to record levels under Biden, averaging 2 million per year, from 2021 to 2023. However, after Trump rallied Republicans to defeat a bipartisan bill that would have expanded immigration enforcement, Biden tightened border restrictions. Illegal crossings have fallen in recent months to the lowest levels since 2020, according to the latest U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.
Trump has blamed Biden for inviting mass migration, and is pledging to close the border and deploy U.S. troops to carry out deportations if he’s elected in November, a position supported by most Americans in a recent poll. The same poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that Americans’ concerns about immigration have risen sharply this year, with 51 percent of Americans saying that the large number of immigrants and refugees entering the country is a “critical threat” to U.S. interests, up from 42 percent last fall to the highest level since 2010.
And while 44 percent of Americans said immigration mattered “a great deal” in their decisions of whom to vote for in the presidential election, 69 percent of Republicans said it mattered a great deal.
Trump and the Republican Party’s depiction of the border as seen in their advertising is part of a broader trend, according to Mittelstadt. “We’ve really seen, and not just in the U.S., but over the last decade, far-right, nationalist and populist parties have latched on to immigration as a very effective issue to motivate their base and turnout support.”
“Some thinking that used to be reserved for the dark places of the internet — like the great replacement theory … now you see them on the airwaves across the United States,” she said.
“Terrorists and illegal immigrants are invading our country,” a voice-over says in one characteristic ad, from a group boosting John Curtis in Utah’s Republican Senate primary. “Young women sold into prostitution, terrorists and illegal immigrants invading our country.” The Post reached out to a representative at Conservative Values for Utah for comment and did not get a response.
Trump and the Republican Party’s depiction of the border as seen in their advertising is part of a broader trend, according to Mittelstadt. “We’ve really seen, and not just in the U.S., but over the last decade, far-right, nationalist and populist parties have latched on to immigration as a very effective issue to motivate their base and turnout support.”
“Some thinking that used to be reserved for the dark places of the internet — like the great replacement theory … now you see them on the airwaves across the United States,” she said.
“Terrorists and illegal immigrants are invading our country,” a voice-over says in one characteristic ad, from a group boosting John Curtis in Utah’s Republican Senate primary. “Young women sold into prostitution, terrorists and illegal immigrants invading our country.” The Post reached out to a representative at Conservative Values for Utah for comment and did not get a response.
In another Trump ad, paid for by the Trump campaign, a voice-over warns viewers that Biden’s immigration policy “raises the possibility of a Hamas attack,” over a clip of a building being blown up. But the building shown in the ad was in Gaza, and was destroyed last year by a rocket fired from the Israeli military, according to the Israel Defense Forces.
This type of visual misinformation can have a dramatic effect on viewers, experts told The Post in separate interviews. “The images tied to immigration, tend to migrate out of their context,” said Jamieson, from the Annenberg Public Policy Center. “We process images more quickly than we process statements that are verbalized or that are in print. And we not only process them more immediately, we process them more viscerally.”
“Campaign ads deserve to be fact-checked” said Jacob Neiheisel, a professor at the University at Buffalo, because “campaigns themselves are inviting you to look at the images.”
Multiple ads show the same scene of migrants running at the border, paired with text on screen that gives the viewer a false impression that migrants are flooding unchecked into the United States. In the unedited video, Border Patrol agents had just instructed migrants in Lukeville, Ariz., whom they were taking to Border Patrol stations, to “start walking to the first camp,” according to a reporter who posted a minute-long video of the scene on X in December and spoke to The Post."
