On Immigration, Dems have a Positioning Problem, Not a Substance Problem

Dems need to emphasize the positives of their own brand, not try to pass themselves off as ImitationTrump

That creaking you heard last week in the hull of the Ship of State? That was the sound of several hundred-pounds-worth of “moderate” Senate Democrats suddenly hurling themselves to starboard. Because in case you didn’t notice, the center of gravity of Washington politics shifted to the extreme right last week—at least as far as immigration is concerned.

It was perhaps no surprise last fall when people like Kyrsten Sinema & Joe Manchin declined to fight for pro-immigrant priorities like a path to citizenship in the Build Back Better package. We were disappointed, but after their stunt with the minimum wage law, etc., at the start of Biden’s presidency, we knew not to have high hopes.

Yet even those sad events didn’t prepare us for what happened last week. Not only Sinema and Manchin, but also no fewer than 3 other members of the only 50-person Democratic Senate majority, suddenly came out in favor of keeping in place a Trump-era shutdown of the asylum system on a quasi-indefinite basis. Apparently the default “centrist” or “moderate” Democratic position had overnight gone from being just a little bit too tepid on a path to citizenship to being full-bore opponents of U.S. asylum law & our country’s international commitments under the UN Refugee Convention.

How could this happen? The generous read is that Democrats saw the headlines, looked at the midterm election forecasts, and panicked. And when people act out of fear, they often fall into one of the worst of all dead-end messaging traps: that of trying to imitate their opponents & outdo them at their own game, rather than being true to themselves.

To be sure, Democrats are right to be concerned. The general consensus seems to be that they are on course for a major defeat in this year’s midterm elections. This would stymie any remaining legislative agenda that they haven’t already sabotaged for themselves; and if it is followed up by a 2024 presidential election loss, the stakes could be higher still: the vindication of outright authoritarian tendencies in the GOP.

Take these troubling signs and add on some fear-mongering headlines, and Senate Democrats are understandably freaked. Especially since the media chose to cover Biden’s decision to finally revoke the Title 42 asylum blockade in the most irresponsible way possible…

Now, it’s been clear since the Title 42 policy went into effect that it: 1) has no public health basis; 2) was really just a pretext to shut down the asylum system; 3) contravenes U.S. & international law guaranteeing that people escaping persecution have the right to a hearing; & 4) resulted in massive human suffering. It shouldn’t be hard to oppose this policy or come up with messaging to explain why it’s bad.

It was equally plain and foreseeable that by shutting down the asylum system for 2+ years, the U.S. government was creating a backlog of people stranded in incredibly dire conditions in Mexico (nearly 10,000 of whom have faced violent attacks while waiting in Mexico during the Biden administration alone, according to Human Rights First). So, of course—as a direct result of the policy itself—as soon as Title 42 ends, many of these currently-stranded individuals and families will approach the border and lawfully request asylum at ports of entry. (Which doesn’t have to be a scary or bad thing to anyone but xenophobes!)

Journalists could have explained all of this. They could have noted that the backlog was caused by Title 42 itself (as a few courageous outliers did); they could have pointed out that seeking asylum is not “illegal immigration,” and that requesting asylum at a port of entry is a perfectly orderly, humane, and secure method of migration that the U.S. government not only has the legal obligation to allow, but which it used to allow routinely! That is, media could have made the point that processing asylum-seekers at the U.S. border is not a new idea. It’s been the law since 1980. Title 42, by contrast, has only been in effect since March 2020. It is supposed to be the exception, not the default, in U.S. border policy.

What did reporters do instead? Well, first they picked up a scary-sounding statistic from a DHS press statement about conceivably 18,000 people crossing a day after Title 42 ends. It turns out that this was just one contingency DHS was planning for—one of several purely hypothetical scenarios used to develop strategy—not an intelligence assessment of what was actually likely to happen; but too late. The damage was done. The scary number and headlines were already out there.

Then, the media completely failed to distinguish between crossings at ports of entry, which are an orderly way to seek asylum so long as the U.S. government processes people expeditiously, from irregular crossings outside ports of entry, which can be more chaotic and unsafe (for the people crossing—let me be clear).

Now, under U.S. law, asylum-seekers are supposed to be allowed to apply for asylum anywhere they are encountered on U.S. soil, whether or not at ports of entry. And under international law—including the refugee convention & protocol that the U.S. has signed—they are supposed to be exempt from laws penalizing unauthorized border crossings, because international principles recognize that people fleeing persecution don’t always get to plan for or ideally choose their method of entry. So none of these post-Title 42 “crossings” of asylum-seekers are going to be “illegal,” whether they take place at ports of entry or not.

But it is certainly true that irregular crossings outside ports of entry are dangerous for the migrants themselves. They often require relying on smuggling networks who may turn out to be traffickers and who frequently take migrants through particularly dangerous areas. No one should be forced to cross irregularly when they don’t have to. But under Title 42, which has effectively sealed the border to asylum-seekers at designated ports of entry, people fleeing persecution have often had no choice but to cross irregularly.

The rates of these sorts of irregular entry will almost certainly *decline* as soon as Title 42 ends, even if rates of people approaching ports of entry will go up. Why? Because people just looking for protection would much rather approach a port of entry and ask for it; rather than having to pay a smuggler and cross in dangerous locales. This is just one of several ways in which ending Title 42 will actually make the border more orderly, more safe, and less chaotic.

The media outlets could have reported all of this. But they didn’t (again, apart from a few noble exceptions). Instead, they pushed a narrative that ending Title 42 was about to cause a “crisis,” a “surge”—and above all a “political nightmare” for Democrats.

Then senators in battleground states, who may not really understand much themselves about what Title 42 even is, panicked and started saying it was bad to end it now without an unspecified “plan” in place ahead of time.

Of course, there is a plan. The plan is called the U.S. Refugee Act. It spells out asylum procedures and has—to repeat—been the law of the land for more than 40 years. But what Democrats were really saying when they cried for a “plan” was that they were anticipating Republican attack ads about “opening the border” and that they didn’t want to look bad. Maybe they genuinely wanted Title 42 to end; but they also didn’t want anyone to come. They wanted to restore asylum without having any asylum-seekers cross, and hoped some “plan” would be invented to allow for that scenario. Sorry, gang, it doesn’t work that way. And since what they were demanding was impossible, it didn’t materialize; so instead, they lined up to support a deeply cynical measure to reinstate the asylum shutdown.

Now, when we saw that Sinema and Lankford were unveiling a bill to try to reinstate Title 42 legislatively, that was a low blow. When we read further in the article and saw that they planned to attach it as an amendment to a COVID relief bill, thereby sabotaging (via the age-old method of the congressional “poison pill”) a carefully-negotiated bipartisan agreement to supply life-saving shots, therapeutics, tests, and other pandemic relief to ordinary Americans, that was an especially cruel twist.

But the unkindest cut of all was seeing the names co-sponsoring this cynical ploy that weren’t always among the usual suspects: New Hampshire’s Maggie Hassan; Montana’s Jon Tester, Arizona’s Mark Kelly—Democrats all, and not names you typically see linked to Manchin and Sinema’s worst policy betrayals.

When Senator Hassan followed this up with a ludicrous video segment positioning herself in front of the “border wall” and reiterating her demand to restore Title 42 on an indefinite basis, we were truly at a low point. We had descended into outright absurdism. It would all be funny if the stakes weren’t literally life-and-death for families, children, and adults living in some of the most dangerous conditions on the planet (reminder: Title 42 expels people summarily, without a hearing, even when they request asylum based on credible fear of persecution. Calling for it to be in place indefinitely is an extreme position for any politician to take, let alone a Democrat!).

The ostensible strategy behind all this grandstanding is as obvious as it is misguided. Conservative Senate Democrats looked at polls showing that “Biden’s decision to end Title 42 is unpopular” and concluded that they need to join the chorus. Want to avoid punishment in the upcoming midterms? Then shift your position to go along with what seems to be the trend in public opinion.

This is an understandable but fatal error. Indeed, it is one of the oldest mistakes in the communications playbook: what marketers refer to as the “me-too” trap. (No relation to the contemporary meaning of the phrase Me Too.)

In their classic book on marketing strategy, Positioning, Al Ries and Jack Trout describe one of the most common mistakes made by companies who are trying to outsell their competitors from a disadvantaged starting position. Ries and Trout are talking primarily about consumer products; but their insights here could apply equally well to the political domain. When one company is down in sales, they often fall over themselves trying to mimic whatever their competitors are doing. They rush onto the market with “me-too” products: that is, things that try to look & sound as close as possible to whatever their more successful rivals are selling without violating trademark laws. It’s working for the competition—the thinking goes—so it must work for us, right?

Wrong. All you will achieve by this method is to come out with something that consumers will regard as a pale imitation: a worse version of the genuine article. So why would they go with you, if all you’re offering is second-best? Of course, you can squander millions of dollars on ad campaigns trying to argue against this perception, saying “we’re actually better than the competition at the same thing they claim to be good at!” But you will convince no one. Especially in the modern information-saturated environment, Ries and Trout argue, it’s no good trying to convince people of things they don’t already believe. If you have to argue, then you’ve already lost the argument. The insight here for marketing strategy is something like the dictum of Sun Tzu in military strategy: the best way to win the war is not to have to fight in the first place. If you find yourself having to fight hard to win, you’re doing it wrong.

Instead of going against the grain of what consumers (“prospects” in Ries & Trout’s lingo) already believe about you, then, you should find out what they believe and work with it. Find out what traits they already associate with you, and figure out how to emphasize the positive ones.

Applying these insights to border politics, we can see why the current conservative Senate Democrat strategy is so bankrupt. It’s the “me-too” trap. They see that Republicans are scoring points by talking “tough on the border” and promising to expel more asylum-seekers. So Democrats say, “well, we can expel asylum-seekers too! We hate immigrants too! Vote for us!” This is the opposite of good positioning. It just makes Democrats looks like ersatz Republicans, imitation Trump, the second-rate version of the real thing. Who wants to vote for that? If people want expulsions, they can vote for Republicans.

No matter what Democrats do, voters will always see Republicans as “tougher” on the border. It’s one of those immovable perceptions in U.S. politics that is not worth arguing over. In much the same way as people will always seen Coke as the original cola, rather than Pepsi.

A Pepsi campaign saying “we’re also an original, generic cola, much like Coke is,” would be as doomed to fail as the current Democratic strategy of saying “we’re also tough on the border and support the same policies as Republicans.” Instead, Pepsi has to find a niche that takes advantage of people’s prior perceptions of the brand as the runner-up: for instance by positioning Pepsi as cool precisely because of its “alternative,” non-generic quality: the “choice of a new generation,” etc. Likewise, Democrats will only succeed if they play into voters’ prior perceptions, which see them as offering something different from what Republicans are selling, and conveys why different, in this case, is good!

Contrary to the headlines, after all, Democrats actually have a number of aspects of public opinion going in their favor, at least as far as immigration is concerned. Conservative Senate Dems may have been scared by those polls last week showing that a majority of people oppose ending Title 42; but we have to remember that most people had no idea what that policy even was before a week ago, when a series of news reports were suddenly screaming at them about a “surge” and impending doom as a result of unwinding the policy. One of the most re-shared articles from Axios was headlined: “Scoop: Biden officials fear "mass migration event" if COVID policies end.” Of course ending it sounds bad, after seeing that! The news media shapes—it doesn’t just describe—public perceptions.

What happens if you frame the question differently? Suppose you ask whether people seeking asylum at the border should have access to a legal process before being deported, or whether they should just be instantly expelled? Well, a recent CBS News/YouGov poll posed the question in just those terms. Lo and behold, a sizable majority of independent voters (59%)—plus 80%+ of Democrats—said they oppose immediate expulsion. Very different results from when people were asked the same question in terms of whether they support keeping Title 42. In an earlier poll framed around that question, only 30% of independents said they favored scrapping Title 42. This is roughly half the number who said they didn’t want people to be immediately expelled. Yet immediate expulsion is all that Title 42 is! Scrapping Title 42 and ending immediate expulsion are the same policy!

Clearly, Democrats don’t actually have a losing policy on their hands, when they talk about ending Title 42—they are just messaging it wrong and have failed to convey what the policy actually entails (probably because a Democratic White House has been implementing and enforcing Title 42 for more than the past year).

There are of course some Americans who simply hate immigrants. Over recent years, they have been concentrated into the GOP, where a majority of Republican voters now agree with the statement that immigrants make U.S. society worse over the long run. Fortunately, this attitude is far from the norm in the rest of our society. Immigration is part of the American story. Most people can connect it with their own family history and see it as basically a good thing.

Democrats can win by activating these shared values. They will never win by being Imitation Trump. No voter is going to be persuaded that “Democrats are tougher on the border.” But they could easily be persuaded that “Democrats foster the American Dream,” or that “Democrats care about offering people a fair legal process, instead of instant expulsion to danger.” These statements comport fully with what people already believe about Democrats and manage to convey something positive about the party’s brand. They speak to shared values that a majority of the U.S. public holds, including most swing voters, without trying to convince people of a single thing that doesn’t already sound plausible based on their prior convictions about Democrats. That’s positioning.

I also think that adopting a positioning approach offers us a way out of the current stalemate in debates around Democratic strategy. Usually, the argument among people trying to win elections for Democrats oscillates back and forth between two mutually-exclusive poles: base mobilization vs. swing voter persuasion.

Many progressive organizers favor base mobilization. They say that Democrats need to deliver on progressive policy priorities, otherwise the people who worked hard to get them elected the last time around won’t show up again at the polls. They say that U.S. politics has become so polarized that there’s no one left to persuade; no minds left to be made up. Almost everyone is already for one party or the other, so winning elections is just a matter of getting your roughly one-half of the electorate more excited about your candidate than the other half is about theirs.

There’s obviously a strong element of truth to that. But the people arguing for a swing-voter persuasion strategy have an equally good point: one grounded in electoral math. Whether it’s fair and right or not (and it’s definitely not), winning a presidential election in the United States does not depend on the popular vote. It depends on the electoral college. And in that body, a disproportionate amount of power rests with a handful of swing states, largely in the South and Midwest, that tip toward one party or the other in every election by a razor-thin margin. So even if it’s true that our politics have gotten more polarized & there are relatively few persuadable swing voters left, these strategists argue, swing voters are still as important as ever to winning elections, if not more so. (Example of this line of thinking by William Galston and Elaine Kamarck.)

Suppose both these groups are right. Suppose the key to electoral success is to mobilize the base and to persuade swing voters to back you. And what if there was a way to do both? Wouldn’t that be nice.

I think that positioning is such a way. Being true to the values that people already associate with the Democratic brand is the only way to retain the momentum and enthusiasm of loyal Democratic voters and progressive organizers crucial to turning people out. Likewise, confirming people’s prior perceptions about Democrats, while casting these associations in positive terms, is the only way to reach swing voters. If you try to tell a bunch of independents: “hey, we can do what Republicans do, only better!”, you will convince no one. People are too wise and jaded for that. But if you say: “Democrats will do what Democrats are good at, and here’s how,” (and add in a little “Republicans will get even worse at what Republicans have always been bad at”), it will make sense to people.

What positive associations do people have with pro-immigration policies, like ending Title 42? Well, that they create opportunities, that they enable people to live the American Dream, that they offer people safety and a fair and orderly process to seek protection from persecution. Senate Democrats could be out there positioning the end of Title 42 and the restoration of asylum—accurately—as a way to foster all of these collective goods. Instead, they (or at least, several of them) are saying: “we know ending Title 42 is bad… we oppose it too! We hate what our party leadership is doing! We’ll work with Republicans to stop it!”

Doomed to fail, doomed to fail… Just think about it and you’ll see. After all, what was far-and-away the most effective argument against Trump’s immigration policies that Democrats ever used? It was that he separated families, right? Why was that so successful? Because separating immigrant families is so perfectly on-brand for Trump.

So too, the most effective GOP attack against Biden has been that he is “soft on the border.” Why? Because it’s on-brand for Democrats and for a president who made decency and compassion part of his electoral strategy.

You can’t defeat on-brand attacks against you with an off-brand defense. You can’t say, “oh yeah, well… we can be cruel too! We can violate asylum-seekers’ internationally-protected rights too! We can expel families too!” Then you’ve just added a bunch of your opponent’s on-brand negative qualities to yourself, while retaining all of your own on-brand negative qualities.

You can only defend against on-brand attacks with an on-brand defense. To do this, you have to be fearless. You have to say, “you know what, we are welcoming asylum-seekers, and we’re proud of it.” You have to say: “Asylum is part of our American values.” You have to say: “Asylum is a legal and orderly process, and every person deserves a fair process to make sure that they won’t be sent back to a place where they face persecution.” You have to say: “it’s what any one of us would ask for ourselves and our families if we had to flee danger. We’d want a fair hearing. It’s what people deserve.”

The xenophobes will roll their eyes and say: “see, we told you so.” Let them. The swing voters—a majority of whom favor asylum as soon as it is accurately described—will sit up and take notice. “Hey, this party is starting to make some sense!”