Democrats are making Paul Ryan optimistic.
While the House Speaker will leave Congress next year, Ryan thinks Democratic gimmicks will preserve a Republican majority long after he is gone. He says their calls to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement show that they have “really jumped the sharks.”
Never mind that one generally jumps a single shark, not several, Ryan is probably right. Democrats have embraced a good hashtag but a bad platform when it comes to ICE.
“They want to get rid of this agency? It’s the craziest position I’ve ever seen and they are tripping over themselves to move too far to the left,” Ryan said at his weekly press briefing. “They are out of the mainstream of the America, and that’s one of the reasons why I feel very good about this fall.”
Calls to abolish ICE show that Democrats have strayed from a winning message and stumbled onto unsteady extremism that the rest of the country does not support.
According to a Harvard-Harris poll, 69 percent of registered voters want more, not less, immigration enforcement. Moreover, ICE agents aren’t the indiscriminate scourges of immigrants that the Left portrays. According to analysis of government data by Pew Research, 74 percent of ICE arrests in 2017 were of immigrants with criminal convictions.
Republicans should repeat those facts and borrow messaging from Ryan in the run-up to November.
“You want to abolish the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement?,” the speaker said. “This is the agency that gets gangs out of our communities, that helps prevent drugs from flowing into our schools, that rescues people from human trafficking.”
On its face, that’s a winning argument. While abolishing ICE plays well in Brooklyn, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez demonstrated, it grates the regular voter who believes in basic law and order and gives Republicans a ready-made talking point.
