MURDER SHE WROTE — When Vice President Kamala Harris takes the debate stage against former President Donald Trump Tuesday evening, she’ll be charged with responding to weeks of attacks from the Trump campaign and its allied Super PACs for allegedly being soft on crime. It’s not exactly a novel line of criticism — for decades, Republicans have blasted Democrats, whom they accuse of not doing enough about crime in America. But in this election cycle, political advertising on the issue has gotten notably more serious and intense, in particular highlighting the murders of white Americans at the hands of largely undocumented immigrants. Where there were once fears that an ad that’s too menacing could spark backlash, this year there are no holds barred. Campaigns around the country are tapping into the raw emotions that are sparked by seeing a dead American’s relatives on screen. In an advertisement from the pro-Trump Preserve America PAC, funded largely by Miriam Adelson, the mother of an 18-year-old who was killed by an undocumented immigrant in 2015 addressed the camera directly about her son’s death. “[My son] was murdered by an illegal alien. He was tortured, strangled to death and then set on fire,” says Laura Wilkerson. Wilkerson was featured prominently in a 2016 Trump ad lambasting Hillary Clinton as well. But her description of his death and her attack on Harris are more direct than the 2016 vintage. “I fear that if Kamala Harris is elected president there will be so many more mothers that will have to go through the things that my family did — kids dying of fentanyl, more kids dying of gang violence, it’s going to get worse under Kamala Harris. I don’t want your family to suffer,” she continued. At the Republican National Convention, they hit a similar theme. Gold Star families of U.S. service members who were killed in the midst of the withdrawal from Afghanistan came on stage to blast President Joe Biden (before he dropped out of the race) and Harris, blaming them for their loved ones’ deaths and failing to properly acknowledge their memory. Trump then courted controversy when he tried to hammer that message home at the Arlington National Cemetery, which doesn’t allow for political statements on their grounds. The most famous example of a political advertisement playing on Americans’ fears of murder remains the 1988 George H.W. Bush “Willie Horton” ad, which attacked his opponent Michael Dukakis for allowing Horton, a prisoner serving time for a murder in the midst of a robbery, to go on a furlough during which he committed more crimes. Experts have credited the ad with helping Bush defeat Dukakis, but also with playing into ugly racial animus in the country. This election cycle, much of the starkest political advertising involving murder has included the specter of illegal immigration. During the State of the Union, a conservative advocacy group ran an ad blasting Biden’s policies, which they argue led to the murder of Laken Riley, a nursing student killed on a jog; the police indicted José Antonio Ibarra, who entered the U.S. illegally, in the case. “Laken Riley should have been able to go on a run in broad daylight without being murdered by an illegal immigrant. But Joe Biden promised not to deport illegal immigrants,” the voiceover in the advertisement read. (Biden’s deportation record is near that of the Trump presidency, according to the Migration Policy Institute.) Another ad posted online in June highlights the 2023 murder of Rachel Morin, and connects her death to Riley’s. “Laken Riley wasn’t the first. And in Joe Biden’s America, sadly she won’t be the last,” the narrator says. The suspected killer in the Morin case was also in the country illegally. An ad in Wisconsin attempted to link Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin with the killing of six people in the state at a Christmas parade in 2021. In New Hampshire, Kelly Ayotte’s Republican gubernatorial campaign had to apologize after an ad of hers falsely stated that a woman named Denise Robert was killed while her opponent Joyce Craig was the mayor of Manchester; Robert’s murder came two years before Craig became mayor. For Republicans, though, the barrage of ads have served to connect the issue of illegal immigration to that of crime and safety. And the concept has serious purchase with much of their base. Just this weekend, a post spread like wildfire in right-wing circles that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were capturing, killing and eating ducks and cats in the area. JD Vance, Ted Cruz and the House Judiciary GOP X account have all posted on social media about the alleged incidents; the Springfield Police Department said this morning they’ve received no reports about pets being abducted and eaten. Republicans are far from alone in using fear as a motivator to get to the polls. Democrats have based much of their 2024 campaign strategy themselves on the idea that a second Trump term could effectively end democracy in the U.S. But the specific attacks on rising crime — related often to immigration — have become a favorite and effective talking point on the right. The question now is whether these advertisements, many of which were written to beat Biden (and name checked him directly) will work on Harris in the same way. Harris has made up some ground on Trump on the issue of crime, but she remains relatively weak on immigration. And she’ll try to use her prosecutorial background in order to head off the idea that she’s soft on crime at the pass. The litany of attack ads involving murdered Americans, though, could just be a preview of how Trump hopes to go after Harris in Tuesday’s debate and in the last two months of the campaign. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at cmchugh@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @calder_mchugh.
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