Tyler Moran and Nick Gourevitch

Opinion contributors

In the final weeks of the 2018 campaign, Donald Trump once again went all in on an electoral strategy of stoking fear about immigrants, this time via the so-called caravan.

But this strategy wasn’t just Trump, it wasn’t just about the caravan, and it wasn’t just a last-minute pitch. It was the culmination of a months-long, coordinated embrace of scare tactics by the entire Republican Party. According to our TV ad monitoring service, GOP candidates, party organizations and outside groups ran more than 280,000 immigration spots that threw the kitchen sink at Democratic candidates — ads on MS-13 gangs, open borders, “sanctuary” cities and, of course, the caravan. That is nearly five times as many ads on immigration as they ran in 2014.

The result? Independent experts all agree this was a Democratic wave and a rejection of the president’s politics. Democrats will end up winning the House popular vote by more than 9 million votes — more than any party in a midterm since 1974, including the Republican wave years of 2010 and 1994. In the end, Democratic candidates got a record-breaking 96 percent of Trump’s total popular vote in 2016.

Trump immigration policies were losers

The wreckage of the Republican embrace of Trumpism is everywhere. Anti-immigrant Trump acolytes like Lou Barletta in Pennsylvania and Corey Stewart in Virginia got walloped in Senate races, while Kris Kobach lost his Kansas gubernatorial bid in a state that Trump carried by 20 points in 2016. In the Barletta race, every singlePennsylvania county moved toward Democrats, including Obama-Trump counties.

In the House, Democrats flipped 40 Republican seats, including 21 districts Trump carried in 2016, many of which featured numerous immigration ads by mainstream Republican groups such as the National Republican Congressional Committee (the Republican House campaign arm) and the Congressional Leadership Fund (the Republican House Leadership super PAC).

Two notable examples include wins by Democrats Sharice Davids of Kansas and Abigail Spanberger of Virginia. Both were both targeted by particularly misleading immigration-related smear campaigns.

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While Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric might have energized Republicans in red states, polling shows it alienated everyone else. It failed with suburban voters; it failed with young voters; it failed with independents; it failed with people of color. There is even evidence that the strategy failed with the same swing voters in industrial states that delivered the election to Trump in 2016.

Polling commissioned by the Immigration Hub with Global Strategy Group in Pennsylvania and Colorado, two 2020 battleground states, found that the Trump strategy backfired with some of the exact people he tried to motivate — women and independents. On Trump’s caravan gambit, 60 percent of independent voters in Colorado said Trump was “playing politics” with the caravan versus acting out of genuine concern for protecting the country. In a separate digital ad testing survey in Pennsylvania, 62 percent of moderate suburban women opposed Republican gubernatorial candidate Scott Wagner’s ad on the “dangerous caravan of illegals.”

Republicans damaged their immigration base

The polling also revealed that aligning with Trump on immigration pushed more people away from voting Republican than attracted them — by 9 points in Pennsylvania and 16 points in Colorado. Among a key bloc of voters who supported Democrat Bob Casey in 2018 and voted for Trump in 2016, just 26 percent said Barletta’s alignment with Trump on immigration was a reason to vote for him, and a plurality believed it was a reason to vote against him. In Colorado, 65 percent of independents said Trump and Republicans are moving away from them on immigration.

For the first time, we are seeing that long-used GOP campaign tactics to stoke fear about immigrants are deeply interwoven with a political ideology — Trumpism. A Republican can’t be “tough on immigration” without carrying all the baggage that Trumpism brings. They are now one and the same. That’s a big shift from the past 20 years of campaigns — there is now a cost to playing this card for Republicans.

What does this all mean for 2020?

These results suggest that voters want solutions and are tired of strategies that divide and distract the electorate. In 2018, fear and hate as a political strategy failed, and candidates who employed values and a unifying message resonated with voters. Republicans running in 2020 now face a choice: Drop this strategy, or continue to play base-first politics that alienate key voting blocs and large swaths of the American public.

Tyler Moran is managing director of The Immigration Hub. Nick Gourevitch, a Democratic pollster, is partner and managing director of Global Strategy Group. Follow them on Twitter: @tyler_t_moran @nickgourevitch