Nobody has to point it out, it’s clear: dressed in a checked shirt and jeanshe look Unlike any average cowboy, JD Vance is at the border. The long dirt road bordered by “the wall,” the white pickup trucks parked behind, the rancher and the border agent, both wearing their cowboy hats. cowboyscomplete the scene. The Republican candidate for vice president was in Cochise County, south of Tucson, in the border area of the State of Arizona, on Thursday morning. It was no coincidence.
The Grand Canyon State is one of a handful of swing states that are likely to decide November’s presidential election, along with North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The latest polls focused on these states, which have been coming out since Joe Biden dropped out of the race, suggest that Kamala Harris has all but erased Trump’s lead over the incumbent. A couple even put her ahead, although all are within the margin of error.
The stakes are wide open, but in an election in which immigration is the main issue, the result in Arizona, the only decisive state that shares a border with Mexico, could have even greater weight. With Vance’s visit and his speech full of constant attacks on Harris, the Republican has taken the battle to ground zero.
Standing in front of the cameras next to the wall that his running mate had begun to build, Vance repeated his favorite lie of recent weeks: that Harris failed in her job as “border czar.” Vance thus echoed an accusation that Trump made as soon as Biden announced that Harris would succeed him and that has since become the Republican Party’s main weapon to attack the vice president’s candidacy. Despite the fact that it is an incorrect statement, Vance stood by his position and even specified the tasks that Harris was supposed to carry out and that, according to him, she has refused to do.
“You can’t have an effective border policy unless you have someone coordinating all the different agencies of the federal government,” the current senator from Ohio began to explain. “You need the involvement of the State Department to return people to their countries of origin. You need the involvement of the Department of Justice to pursue these terrible drug crimes. And of course, you need the involvement of the Department of Homeland Security so that the Border Patrol can do its job. Kamala Harris, as border czar, was asked to coordinate all these functions of the government and she has done nothing,” he concluded. “It’s a scandal and a disgrace.”
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Although Vance claims that the media is “lying” to cover up the fact that Harris was indeed the “border czar,” the reality is that the vice president never held that position. Right at the beginning of his presidency, Biden did assign her a role in his administration’s immigration policies, but her role was more diplomatic and had nothing to do with border oversight. Specifically, Biden tasked her with coordinating relations with the so-called Northern Triangle—Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, countries that then accounted for the majority of migrants arriving at the southern border of the United States—to address the “root causes” of emigration from this region. This was explained by the president himself in March 2021 when he announced that Harris would assume this responsibility, a task similar to the one he himself had when he was Barack Obama’s vice president.
Harris was to lead a strategy to improve economic and security conditions in these three countries, through investment in the region, job creation, fighting corruption, and reducing violence, so that migrants would reconsider migrating to the United States. It was a long-term plan, which the Biden administration acknowledged from the beginning. Whether the strategy was successful or not is debatable, as border crossings skyrocketed during the first three years of the Biden administration and reached historic highs until they began to fall in 2024, but the proportion of migrants from the triangle countries declined. The truth is that Harris was never appointed “border czar.”
Since becoming the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Vance, Trump and most of the Republican Party have placed the blame squarely on Harris, alongside her immigration responsibilities, for facilitating the trafficking of fentanyl into the country. On Thursday in Arizona, the issue was brought up again and again. First, the border agent who introduced Vance said that by 2022, 23% of all fentanyl seized in the country had been confiscated within a 20-mile (32 km) radius of where they were standing. Then, in his remarks to the media, the vice presidential candidate recalled the devastation that the strong opioid causes in the population with a personal anecdote — his mother was addicted to heroin when he was a child — and placed all the responsibility on Harris and what she has “unleashed on this border.”
But while border enforcement has never been the responsibility of the current vice president, no one denies that the situation is critical. Just this Thursday, some 200 miles (321 km) to the west, still in Arizona, a record four million fentanyl pills were seized that a 20-year-old Arizona man was trying to smuggle into the United States.
Polls show immigration and the opioid crisis as some of the most important issues for voters across the country, especially in Arizona. It is no surprise, then, that Republicans are attacking this state with these two issues at the forefront, as winning Arizona will be vital to winning the presidency. In the last two elections, they decisively tipped the overall balance by a slim margin. Biden took it in 2020 by just 0.3 points.
In this year’s race, Trump had been building up a lead that by early July, before Biden dropped out, was as high as eight points, according to some polls. Since the president announced he was making way for Kamala Harris, however, the gap has been rapidly narrowing. By the end of July, a Bloomberg poll put the Democrat ahead of the Republican candidate in Arizona by two points; a trend that has been replicated in all the swing states. In some, she is only narrowing the gap, but in Michigan, a state that seemed to have turned its back on Biden, Harris would now have an 11-point lead. The change can be seen in the general polls as well.
Riding the wave of enthusiasm generated by her candidacy, Kamala Harris has not yet made any obvious moves to court Arizona voters specifically, although she has received support from a handful of mayors of border cities, almost all of them from this state. The mission has been to gather support from certain groups that, with Biden on the ballot, were, according to polls, beginning to shift their voting intention to Trump, such as Latinas and black men. But the Democrat has an ace up her sleeve in the form of her possible vice-presidential candidate. Arizona Senator Mark Kelly is one of the names most likely to accompany her on the ballot in November, precisely because he can help achieve the essential victory in the border state.
According to the party, the official announcement will be made before next Tuesday. Although Kelly appears to be the favorite in the bookies, there is another man who is also a strong candidate for vice president: Josh Shapiro, the popular Democratic governor of Pennsylvania. The logic for choosing him over the senator from Arizona is essentially the same; Shapiro can help win in this other swing state. It remains to be seen in which scenario the party considers it needs more help, in the fight for the rust belt or in the great battle of the border.