Friend,
For the last 2 years, America’s Voice has been keeping track of and analyzing campaign ads that attack immigrants, stoke xenophobia, and inflame racism.
Now that the 2020 campaign season has officially ended, we’re ready and thrilled to share some of our results.
We tracked over 1,000 ads from candidates, political committees, and SuperPACs that employed racist and xenophobic dog-whistles in the 2020 cycle alone. These ads used messages and images that generated fear, fueled racism, and incited violence as part of candidates’ divide and distract strategy. Funded by the biggest corporations and brands in the U.S., they too must reckon with the consequences of what they paid for.
You can see all the ads in our campaign database.
After a half-century of using racist and xenophobic dog-whistles, our analysis shows that these appeals are losing their efficacy. This is new and important, presenting an opportunity for a multi-racial, multi-ethnic majority to push forward to a U.S. that works for US ALL.
Donald Trump, whose xenophobic messages were a pillar since he ran his first campaign in 2015, lost the 2020 election with over 80 million voters rejecting his style of politics. In battleground races, running racists ads was often more of a liability than an asset with the GOP failing to win back the House and Senate.
You can see our full ads report here with additional analysis>>
Immigration is losing its edge as a wedge issue. Once an issue that some could use to divide the electorate for their own political gain, the American people now overwhelmingly support immigrants and want solutions to fix a broken system.
This is because Trump era anti-immigrant politics backfired. By creating and implementing cruel and inhumane immigration policies such as the “Zero Tolerance” child separation, the Muslim Ban, “Remain in Mexico” and countless others during his time as president, Trump actually made Americans MORE pro-immigrant.
Today, 68% of Americans, including the majority of Republicans support a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the country. This is 10 percentage points higher than in 2016 before Trump was president.
- Democrats were unified and confidently more pro-immigrant in 2020 elections from the top of the ticket on down
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Several prominent Senate and House Republican winners tried to distance their campaigns from Trump’s xenophobia and anti-immigrant cruelty
- Corporate America played a key role in the dissemination of these ads as many of the ads were paid, in part, by donations to the candidates, political committees and SuperPACS
While the xenophobic and racist coded messages will continue, our report makes it clear that these strategies are losing their power. A divide and distract strategy that relied on anti-immigrant and racist messaging has been on the decline in recent years and tremendously backfired in 2020. The majority of voters want solutions, and are unconvinced by scapegoating and fear-mongering.
We must continue to call out and reject these anti-immigrant, racist and xenophobic messages. Political candidates must stop using immigrants and racism as a way to try to get elected, and corporations must end their role in broadcasting these messages.
In solidarity,
Juana
