It’s not clear that the White House has thought through Biden’s border-security messaging.
In the days leading up to the release of compromise legislation focused on the border crisis, reporters citing sources close to the president peddled the notion that the bill was a win-win for Biden. If it passed, he would be able to claim credit for the downward pressure it would put on the migrant influx while spreading blame for the crisis around Congress, which would have taken some ownership of it. If it failed, all the better. Biden could then spend the general-election campaign claiming that, but for the GOP’s recalcitrance, the border crisis would have been addressed.
With that bill set to fail and the Senate prepared to strip the border-related provisions from it, the president seems to be putting his plan into effect. “Every day between now and November, the American people are going to know that the only reason the border is not secure is Donald Trump,” Biden told reporters on Tuesday. “He’d rather weaponize this issue than actually solve it.”
The president’s tactic is cynical, though not entirely unsound. He is aided in his quest to pin the blame for the crisis over which he has presided onto the GOP by Donald Trump, who implored Biden to “blame it on me.” But as an Axios report illustrating the scale of the messaging challenge before Biden revealed, trying “to convince an angry electorate that he’s more serious about fixing the border than Trump is” will be an uphill slog.
“Biden is walking a fine line on an issue that is dividing his own party, with some Democrats concerned Biden is channeling Trump, not challenging him,” that dispatch read. Indeed, the best the president can hope for is to “seize the issue and play Trump to a draw.”
A “win” is not in the cards for Biden, and why would it be? The president campaigned for the White House by insisting on the virtue of welcoming asylum-seekers because “that’s who we are.” The crisis began on Biden’s watch after he took several deliberate, highly publicized steps to unravel Trump’s border-security policies. Poll after poll has shown that voters trust Republicans to do a better job than Democrats at managing the issue of immigration by double-digit margins, and the vast majority of voters blame Biden for the surge of migrants into the U.S. over the last several years.
If Biden manages to change an impression in voters’ minds that Democrats have been cultivating for years, it would be an act of Svengali-like prestidigitation. How, exactly, does he plan to incept in voters’ minds the notion that the GOP broadly and Trump specifically are lax enforcers of immigration law? By just saying that again and again until it takes hold? Do Biden’s handlers really believe that a president as unpopular as he is capable of that kind of neurolinguistic programming? If they do, they would first have to explain why concepts such as “Bidenomics” failed to launch. Only a wildly inflated sense of their own ability to manipulate the public could lead the president to conclude that he could outflank Trump on his signature issue.
None of this is to say that balking at the border compromise is good politics for the GOP outside partisan Republican audiences. If we take the Republican Party’s advantages in surveys at face value, we must also conclude that the voters are not playing political games when they tell pollsters they want to see action taken to close the border yesterday. The congressional GOP’s decision to scuttle this legislation and cast a pox on the poor lawmakers whose only sin was to attempt to legislate comes with its share of risks. But the emerging Republican line on the border bill is that the legislation was too accommodating to border-crossers — surely a message that complicates Biden’s strategy. And because voters really do want to see action taken at the border, the president is unlikely to benefit from continued chaos even if he tries to pin it on the GOP.
If the president wants his message to stick, he has to at least attempt to take action to close the border insofar as he can. He can claim that there’s only so much he can do in the absence of statutory reforms, but he would have to do something. Indeed, the president has already begun to make some effort to reduce the pressure at the border — compelling Mexico to police its side of the Rio Grande, for example, and restarting some deportation flights. But if additional efforts to close the border are even partially successful, that will undermine the dubious talking point that nothing can be done about the crisis. If Biden takes no action or merely gestures in the direction of border security, he still has his talking point, but he also still has the crisis that is rapidly consuming his presidency.
It’s not clear that the White House has thought this one through.