As the 2024 election hits its stretch run, an organization supporting Donald Trump is betting big that swing-state voters will recoil from the truth about Kamala Harris’ immigration record.
Make America Great Again Inc. has made a $48 million ad buy in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania — where 46 electoral votes are up for grabs — with $6.1 million being spent in the Grand Canyon State, $9 million in the Peach State and a whopping $32.9 million in the Keystone State.
The spot, launched Tuesday, starts off with a female narrator warning that “safety in our streets and justice in our courtrooms are under attack” because of Harris’ “dangerous liberal values.”
The ad includes a callback to one of Harris’ most infamous social media posts, a 2020 plea to “chip in now to the Minnesota Freedom Fund to help post bail for those protesting in the ground on Minnesota,” a euphemistic reference to the rioters in the streets of Minneapolis after George Floyd’s death.
Yet it wasn’t just protesters who got Harris’ help. It was also some of the sickest members of our society, who were using a moment of national chaos as cover.
Among those bailed out, the ad notes: a “registered sex offender charged with terrorizing, raping and threatening an 8-year-old girl.” Local reporting corroborated this at the time.
The ad then references one of Harris’ more recent remarks — the claim that her “values have not changed” despite positions that have since her first campaign for president and her insistence that she understands the “importance of safety.”
“No, she doesn’t,” the narrator retorts, calling Harris “dangerously liberal” and “still dangerous for America.”
The ad, which runs through Election Day, attempts to capitalize on momentum in these states against illegal immigration the Biden-Harris administration fostered, with the most potent example being in the Southwest.
In Arizona, arguably hardest hit by cross-border traffic, voters are on track to approve Proposition 314, a ballot measure that would allow police to do what the feds won’t — clamp down on illegal immigration.
A recent poll found 77% of Republicans, 57% of independents and 53% of Democrats are on board.
CNN polling this month found Trump is more trusted in the battleground states on the issue of immigration, with a 17-point advantage in Arizona and a 9-point edge across the swing-state map.
In short, it’s an issue that plays to the former president’s strengths and the vice president’s weaknesses and could lead to peril for Harris in November.