Democratic senators say they bungled border security in 2024

Democratic senators are privately acknowledging their party committed “political malpractice” by bungling the issue of border security, which they view as a driving factor behind President-elect Trump’s sweeping victory and their loss of four Senate seats.

Democratic senators had a long and intense conversation about what went wrong in this year’s election during a recent lunch meeting in the wood-empaneled Mansfield Room just off the Senate floor.

Senators at the meeting offered a variety of theories about why their party got routed on Election Day, despite what many of them see as President Biden’s impressive accomplishments and the strength of the economy.

Many Senate Democrats think voters’ sour views about Biden’s record was driven by their anger over rising costs. That was probably the biggest factor behind Trump’s victory, they say.

But there’s a growing feeling among Democratic lawmakers that the Biden administration completely mismanaged the huge surge of migrants across the southern border and that this also hurt their party dearly.

“We destroyed ourselves on the immigration issue in ways that were entirely predictable and entirely manageable. We utterly mismanaged that issue, including our Democratic caucus here,” one Democratic senator told The Hill.

“That’s political malpractice. That’s not someone else’s fault. That’s not the groups pushing us around,” the lawmaker added.

Some Democrats think Biden made a huge mistake in May 2023, when he lifted Title 42, the emergency health order Trump had put in place to block migrants from entering the country to seek asylum. Biden’s decision allowed millions of migrants to stay in the country while their asylum cases slowly moved through the courts.

Senate Democrats tried to find political cover on the issue by blaming Trump for defeating the bipartisan border security bill they negotiated with Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) in February.  

When asked about Biden’s border record, vulnerable Democratic candidates would argue Senate Democrats had crafted a bill to reform the asylum process. They said that bill gave the president broad new power to close the border, but Republicans killed it because they wanted to campaign on the issue.

In the end, that strategy and argument proved ineffective.

A second Democratic senator said “a lot of Democrats think” Biden and other party leaders mismanaged the situation at the border.

The lawmaker said he was dismayed by Biden’s blanket approach to reversing Trump’s immigration policies immediately taking office.

Biden ended Trump’s “remain in Mexico” policy, halted construction of the border wall, implemented a 100-day moratorium on deportations and paused other interior immigration enforcement initiatives.

“Why would you do that? Who are you trying to play to? What’s the benefit to that?” said the lawmaker, who called border policy Biden’s “Achilles' heel.”

The senator, however, said Biden was right to rescind Trump’s “zero-tolerance” migrant family separation policy.  

The final New York Times/Siena College poll of likely voters in the seven battleground states found immigration ranked nearly as highly as abortion as voters’ top concern, with both trailing the economy.

And the Times/Siena poll of likely voters in the "blue wall" states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in August found voters trusted Trump more than Vice President Harris on the issue by a margin of 51 percent to 46 percent.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.), who left the Democratic Party to become an independent after the 2022 midterms, warned years ago that the Biden administration was unprepared for the deluge of migrants that would follow the end of Title 42.

She introduced a bipartisan bill to extend Title 42’s expulsion authority for two years, a proposal Sens. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) also supported.

Sens. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) and Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) joined Sinema in warning Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas in November 2022 that ending Title 42 would result in an explosion of border crossings.

And eight senate Democrats — Brown, Tester, Manchin, Kelly, Hassan and Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (N.H.), Jacky Rosen (Nev.) and Jon Ossoff (Ga.) — voted for an amendment in December 2022 to protect Title 42. 

Several House Democrats blamed Biden’s handling of the border as a major factor behind Republicans winning control of the White House and Senate and clinging to their House majority.

Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) told CNN shortly after Election Day that the border crisis was a major reason why Democrats lost ground with working-class voters.

“It just busted this year,” he said.

Rep. Susie Lee (D-Nev.), who won a close reelection race in a battleground state that Harris lost, told CNN: “Biden mismanaged the border.”

But Democratic lawmakers say that while their party’s handling of border security and immigration cost them many votes, they need to dig deeper into why Harris lost all seven battleground states.

“We need to look at exactly what happened. We know we lost men, we lost Hispanics, we lost women. We’re not connecting with people, but also it’s part of the pendulum swinging” back to the right and “Trump appealing to people in ways” that Harris couldn’t, said a third Democratic senator who requested anonymity to comment on internal Senate Democratic Caucus discussions about what went wrong.

This lawmaker said social media platforms such as X — formerly known as Twitter — and TikTok spread Trump’s message more effectively than Biden’s or Harris’s.

“Social media is, so far, the unanalyzed and unaccounted-for factor. Something is happening there that we didn’t address,” the senator said.

Biden moved aggressively in June to crack down on migration by signing an executive order to pause asylum requests once the average number of daily encounters passed 2,500 between ports of entry, but Democrats on Capitol Hill said the move came far too late.

“You can’t go three and a half years with the perception being you’ve done nothing, to doing something right before the election and expect it to have an impact,” a Democratic strategist said.

“Even some of the Latinos that moved over to Trump, it’s not a stretch to say that some of them voted for Trump because they don’t want people following them in,” the source added.

Exit polling showed Trump won Latino men over Harris by a margin of 54 percent to 44 percent, despite his long record of harsh statements about migrants, who are overwhelmingly Hispanic, and their impact on the country.

“I think Democrats equated being hardcore on the border as being anti-Latino,” the strategist said in explaining why Democratic leaders took a cautious approach.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who crafted the strategy of pointing to the bipartisan border security deal with Lankford as a principal defense for vulnerable incumbents, declined to speak in much detail about why Democrats fared so poorly on Election Day.

He said the Democratic senators would hold more conversations to analyze the results and emphasized Senate Democratic incumbents and candidates still managed to win in four states Trump carried: Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin.

But that optimistic view is cold comfort to many Democratic senators after watching Tester, Brown and Pennsylvania’s Sen. Bob Casey (D) lose.

“It was a change election, and we were on the wrong side of a change election,” a fourth Democratic senator remarked after emerging from more than an hour of postelection analysis with colleagues in the Mansfield Room.

“The problem was the presidential ticket,” the lawmaker said. “I think Harris was given a really difficult task."

“She’s the vice president, and being the vice president in a change election is pretty tough. She would have had to really break [with Biden] on some issues,” the source added.

The senator also said Trump did a masterful job of linking immigration to the economy and crime.

“Trump did this narrative — it wasn’t just anti-immigration — he connected it all up to the economy. ‘Housing prices are going up, you’re losing your job, wages,’” the lawmaker added.

The center said the party needs to listen to Sinema and Democrats such as Brown, Tester, Rosen, Shaheen and Hassan who want the party to tack to the center on border security.

“People who say, ‘Be more moderate,’ if they’re talking about the border, I agree. I’ve always agreed,” the senator said.