Pre-election fears by some Republicans that President Donald Trump’s inflammatory immigration message would sink GOP candidates in tight races proved overblown. | Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images elections Trump’s immigration push may have stemmed GOP losses

President Donald Trump’s intense focus on immigration in the run-up to the midterms appears to have stemmed GOP losses in Tuesday’s election, according to a POLITICO analysis of 34 close House, Senate and gubernatorial races.

Democrats took control of the House, as predicted, but Republicans were on track to expand their majority in the Senate.


Pre-election fears by some Republicans that Trump’s inflammatory immigration message would sink GOP candidates in tight races proved overblown. And while more authoritative analysis awaits further election returns and more detailed polling analysis, the message appears in some races to have worked.

“If he was not as effective as he was, I’m not certain that Republicans would have turned out in the way they did,” said Republican strategist Shermichael Singleton. “You’ve got to give credit to the president. He closed the gap by making this about him.”

Even so, several Republican candidates closely aligned with Trump’s immigration agenda were defeated, including Kansas gubernatorial nominee Kris Kobach and Rep. Dave Brat of Virginia.

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POLITICO tracked 21 close races in the House, nine in the Senate and four gubernatorial races across the country, based on information provided by advocates on both sides of the immigration issue. Of these, Democrats won 15 contests and Republicans won 12 contests. But Republicans led in six out of seven races that hadn’t been called by Wednesday afternoon.

In making immigration a major theme in the lead-up to the election, Trump succeeded at the very least in persuading voters it was a top issue, to judge from exit polls. For weeks, the president warned darkly that a caravan of Central American migrants traveling north through Mexico en route to the United States represented an “invasion” and “national emergency.”

In response, he deployed 5,200 troops to the southwest border — and threatened to increase the number to 15,000. The White House also floated a mix of measures to deter families arriving at the border, including a reprise of the president’s widely criticized family separation policy. In a surprise move, Trump further suggested last week that he could issue an executive order to roll back birthright citizenship, an action most legal experts argue would run afoul of the Constitution.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who won reelection Tuesday by a relatively narrow margin over Democratic Rep.Beto O'Rourke, may have benefited the most from Trump’s immigration offensive.

Trump visited Houston to rally for Cruz in late October. While there, he tarred O’Rourke as a “a radical open-borders left-winger” and accused Democrats of “encouraging millions of illegal aliens to break our laws, violate our borders and overwhelm our nation.”

Beyond that, the president surged troops to the border just days before the election — what some critics viewed as an expensive wager that immigration could increase Republican turnout.

Following the deployment, Cruz took the opportunity to lambaste his opponent as soft on security. “He is waiting on the Rio Grande with welcome baskets and foot massages,” the incumbent senator said of O’Rourke.

“I think the message resonated with a lot of people,” said Singleton. “Some folks will call it fear. I think it was more about order, I think it was more about law.”

But other Republicans who embraced Trump’s hard-line immigration views went down Tuesday.

In Virginia, Brat fell to Democratic challenger Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA agent. In 2014, the Tea Party-backed Brat defeated then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a primary challenge in part by attacking him for supporting “amnesty” for undocumented immigrants.

Todd Schulte, president of the Mark Zuckerberg-backed FWD.us, considered the outcome one of several that amounted to a rejection of Trump’s contentious immigration policies. In a written statement, Schulte called the election “a stunning rebuke for the leaders of the hard-line, anti-immigrant movement, with their champions losing badly.”

A more diverse electorate in certain House districts appears to have weakened the effectiveness of Republican attack ads on immigration, according to New American Economy, an organization backed by Michael Bloomberg. The group found that all 27 of the districts that Democrats have wrested from Republicans in vote tallies thus far experienced a proportional increase in Hispanic and Asian American voters between 2016 and 2018.

Kobach, Kansas' secretary of state, fell in a three-way race for governor of that state. Kobach had advised Trump’s presidential campaign on immigration issues and played a lead role in the administration’s now-defunct commission to root out alleged voter fraud, which stemmed from the president’s baseless allegation that millions of undocumented immigrants had voted in the 2016 election.

“He has a long history of vilifying immigrants and pushing repressive policies. He has inflicted pain on millions. It finally caught up with him,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of the pro-immigrant America’s Voice, in an election-night statement.

In Pennsylvania, Republican Rep. Lou Barletta — a long-shot challenger with Trump’s backing — failed to unseat Democratic Sen. Bob Casey. As mayor of Hazleton, Pa., from 2000 to 2010, Barletta blasted an influx of undocumented immigrants and backed a local ordinance that made it illegal to rent housing to undocumented immigrants. (A federal appeals court found the ordinance unconstitutional in 2010.)

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) — an immigration hard-liner known for offensive, racially charged comments — struggled in an unusually close contest. Just days before the election, National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Rep. Steve Stivers of Ohio called out King in an effort to “stand up against white supremacy and hate in all forms.”

King is projected to win his Iowa district by roughly 3 percent, a tiny margin in a reliably Republican area. Trump won the district by 27 percent in 2016.

Democratic pollster Jeff Liszt, partner at the firm ALG Research, said Trump’s focus on immigration before the elections reflected an attempt to retain the Republican grip on the Senate while “[lighting] the House majority on fire by ignoring the swing voters who are going to be turned off.”

On Tuesday night, Democrats captured seats in suburban districts where GOP candidates suffered from an association with Trump. Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-Va.), who sponsored a 2017 bill that targeted alleged immigrant gang members, lost to Democrat Jennifer Wexton, a state senator. Other GOP lawmakers in districts that Hillary Clinton won in 2016 went down, too, including Reps. Carlos Curbelo of Florida, Kevin Yoder of Kansas and Mike Coffman of Colorado.

Several Democrats running for Senate in states Trump won in 2016 struggled even after adopting a tougher tone on immigration — an indication that Trump moved the immigration conversation rightward by harping on the migrant caravan.

Rep. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) trailed Rep. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.) on Wednesday morning in the race to fill the Senate seat held by retiring GOP Sen. Jeff Flake. The contest remained too close to call.

Sinema transformed herself from a liberal lawmaker to a centrist Democrat in recent years — and immigration hasn’t been an exception. When Trump announced he would deploy 5,200 troops to the border, Sinema backed the move. The deployment “should be a part of our work to gain situational control over the border,” she told the Arizona Republic.

Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) notched a victory Wednesday in a competitive race against Republican challenger Matt Rosendale, a Montana state official. The president visited the state four times and pilloried Tester on immigration, but the Montana lawmaker secured a third term in a state Trump won by 20 percentage points in 2016.

Democratic pollster Celinda Lake argued before the election that Trump’s attempt to stoke fears around immigration gave a short-lived jolt to Rosendale, but wasn’t enough to propel him to victory.

“They certainly closed the race and tightened the race, but in the end, they couldn’t hold it,” Lake said on a call with reporters. “They caused just as much backlash in some of the small towns and suburban areas as they did picking up votes.”

Other Senate Democrats, such as Sens. Joe Donnelly of Indiana and, to a lesser extent, Missouri's Claire McCaskill, embraced a tougher tone on immigration, but lost on Tuesday evening.

This report has been updated with election results and additional reporting.