Democratic senators privately admit their party committed “political misconduct” by botching the issue of border security, which they say is a driving factor in President-elect Trump’s overwhelming victory and loss of four Senate seats.
Democratic senators had a long, intense conversation about what went wrong in this year’s election during a recent lunch meeting in the wood-paneled Mansfield Room, just off the Senate floor.
Senators present at the meeting expressed different theories about why their party fell to defeat on Election Day, although many of them appreciated President Biden’s impressive achievements and the strength of the economy.
Many Senate Democrats believe voters’ negative view of Biden’s record stems from their anger over rising costs. That was probably the biggest factor in Trump’s victory, they say.
But there is a growing feeling among Democratic lawmakers that the Biden administration has completely mishandled the huge influx of migrants across the southern border and that it has also done great damage to their party.
“We have destroyed ourselves on immigration in a completely predictable and entirely manageable way. We have handled this issue completely poorly, including our Democratic caucus here,” a Democratic senator told The Hill.
“This is political misconduct. This isn’t anyone else’s fault. These are not the groups pushing us around,” the lawmaker added.
Some Democrats believe Biden made a huge mistake in May 2023 when he repealed Title 42, the emergency public health order Trump issued to prevent migrants from entering the country to seek asylum. Biden’s decision allowed millions of migrants to remain in the country while their asylum claims were slowly heard in court.
Senate Democrats tried to put a political spin on the issue by blaming Trump for rejecting the bipartisan border security bill they negotiated with Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) in February.
When asked about Biden’s border policy, vulnerable Democratic candidates responded that Senate Democrats had drafted a bill to reform the asylum process. They said the bill gave the president sweeping recent powers to close borders, but Republicans rejected it because they wanted to campaign on the issue.
In the end, this strategy and argument proved ineffective.
A second Democratic senator said “many Democrats think” that Biden and other party leaders mishandled the situation at the border.
Lawmakers said they were dismayed by Biden’s blanket approach to reversing Trump’s immigration policies immediately after 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 domestic immigration enforcement initiatives.
“Why would you do that? Who are you trying to play to? “What’s the benefit of that?” said the lawmaker, who called border policy Biden’s “Achilles heel.”
However, the senator said Biden was right to overturn Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy on separating migrant families.
The latest New York Times/Siena College poll of likely voters in the seven battleground states found immigration ranked almost as high as abortion as voters’ top concern, with both countries lagging behind the economy.
And the Times/Siena poll of likely voters in the blue wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in August found that voters trusted Trump more on the issue than Vice President Harris, 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 midterm elections, warned years ago that the Biden administration was unprepared for the flood 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 also supported by Senators Joe Manchin (IW.Va.) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio).
Sens. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) and Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) joined Sinema to warn Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in November 2022 that ending Title 42 would be too an explosion would result from border crossings.
And eight Senate Democrats — Brown, Tester, Manchin, Kelly, Hassan and Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (NH), Jacky Rosen (Nev.) and Jon Ossoff (Ga.) — voted for an amendment protecting Title 42 in December 2022 .
Several House Democrats blamed Biden’s handling of the border as a key reason Republicans gained control of the White House and Senate and clung to their majority in the House.
Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) told CNN shortly after Election Day that the border crisis was a key reason Democrats were losing ground among working-class voters.
“This year it just fell apart,” he said.
Rep. Susie Lee (D-Nev.), who won a close re-election race in a battleground state that Harris lost, told CNN: “Biden has 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 have to take a close look at what happened. We know we’ve lost men, we’ve lost Hispanics, we’ve lost women. “We’re not connecting with the people, but it’s also part of the pendulum swinging back to the right” and “Trump is appealing to the people in a way that Harris couldn’t,” said a third Democratic senator, speaking anonymously wanted to stay to comment on internal Senate Democratic Caucus discussions about what went wrong.
This lawmaker said social media platforms like X – formerly known as Twitter – and TikTok spread Trump’s message more effectively than Biden’s or Harris’s.
“Social media has so far been the unanalyzed and unconsidered factor. There’s something going on that we haven’t addressed,” the senator said.
In June, Biden took robust action on migration by signing an executive order suspending asylum applications once the average number of daily encounters between ports of entry exceeded 2,500, but Democrats on Capitol Hill said the move was far too behind schedule came.
“You can’t spend three and a half years feeling like you’ve done nothing, then do something right before the election and expect it to have an impact,” said one Democratic strategist.
“Even with some Latinos who have switched to Trump, it’s not an exaggeration to say that some of them voted for Trump because they don’t want people to follow them,” the source added.
Exit polls showed Trump winning over Harris among Latino men by a 54 percent to 44 percent margin, despite his long history of harsh statements about migrants, who are predominantly Hispanic, and their impact on the country.
“I think Democrats have equated hardcore border strife with anti-Latino,” the strategist said, explaining why Democratic leaders took a cautious approach.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who developed the strategy of pointing to the bipartisan border security agreement with Lankford as the main defense for vulnerable incumbents, declined to talk in detail about why Democrats performed so poorly on Election Day .
He said Democratic senators would hold further discussions to analyze the results, stressing that Democratic Senate incumbents and candidates still managed to win in four states that Trump carried: Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin.
But that confident view is chilly comfort to many Democratic senators after watching Tester, Brown and Pennsylvania 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 noted after analyzing with colleagues in the Mansfield Room more than an hour after the election.
“The problem was the presidential ticket,” the lawmaker said. “I think Harris has been given a really difficult task.”
“She’s the vice president, and it’s pretty tough to be vice president in a swing election. She really should have broken [with Biden] on a number of topics,” the source added.
The senator also said Trump did a masterful job of linking immigration to the economy and crime.
“Trump made this narrative – it wasn’t just anti-immigration – he tied everything to the economy. “Property prices go up, you lose your job and your salary,” the lawmaker added.
The center said the party needs to listen to Sinema and Democrats like Brown, Tester, Rosen, Shaheen and Hassan who want the party to join the center on border security.
“People who say, ‘Be more moderate’ when they talk about the border, I agree with that. I have always agreed,” the senator said.
