The fact that immigration was not leading the conversation even here, on the border, made me think that as intensely as people speak about the issue, something else was going on. For many of the people I spoke with, the migrant crisis seemed to function as a stand-in for deeper frustrations — a fear of destabilization, broadly, or a sense that there is not a steady hand at the helm.
Migrant crossings have been going on for so long, Michael Apodaca, chair of the El Paso County Democratic Party, told me, that border policy rarely comes up in the complaints he hears about Biden. Instead, it’s “just a frustration with other things, from the economy to, ‘Is Biden really the right person?’” That and some people’s “feeling that we’re not getting anywhere … and the worry of what happens if the other side wins.”
In a way, this is good news for Biden. As Fernand Amandi, a veteran Democratic pollster, told me, Biden will take a hit on the border, “only if the economy is doing really well in the early fall, late summer of 2024.”
Immigration, he said, “is a consideration issue only when people can’t complain about stuff they’d otherwise complain about.” In recent focus groups, he said, “probably one of 100 people, two or three might die on the immigration hill. Not even three. Two.”
But that doesn’t mean voters don’t want government to do something — or that inaction on the border doesn’t fold into the broader critiques of Biden and the Democratic Party that Apodaca hears and that Escobar fears could hurt the party next year.
In the El Paso council election, one of the Democrats who did advance, Josh Acevedo, a local school board member, shook his head when I asked him about Gutierrez’s position on immigration. We were sitting in the backyard of a supporter’s house that was functioning as a campaign operations center on election day.
“I think people are led with fear,” he said.