Anika Begay
During a three-day campaign tour in Nevada and Arizona, Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance repeatedly blamed Kamala Harris for what he called the Biden administration’s failures.
ARI SHAPIRO, GUEST:
In a three-day campaign trail in Nevada and Arizona, Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance repeatedly blamed what he called the Biden administration’s failures on Vice President Harris. NPR’s Ben Giles has been following Vance’s travels across the border, and now he’s with us. Hey, Ben.
BEN GILES, BYLINE: Hello.
SHAPIRO: So you kicked off your southwest tour of Nevada with stops in Reno and Henderson on Tuesday. What was your message early on to voters there?
GILES: So Vance blamed Harris for the record numbers of border crossings early in the Biden administration, even though we should note that illegal border crossings have declined significantly in recent months. They’ve hit their lowest levels since 2020. Vance also reiterated that message, though, at a campaign rally in the Phoenix suburbs last night and again along the Arizona-Mexico border in Cochise County early this morning, where he met with Border Patrol officials and local law enforcement.
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JD VANCE: It’s hard to believe until you see with your own eyes how bad the Kamala Harris administration’s policies have been when it comes to the southern border.
GILES: Vance repeated that specific phrase several times this morning at the border, the Harris administration, as the Trump campaign tries to spotlight Harris now that she’s the leading Democratic presidential candidate.
SHAPIRO: And Vance described what the Trump administration would have done differently at the border than Biden and Harris had?
GILES: Yeah. So Vance, as well as Paul Perez, the president of the Border Patrol union, said that the policies that Trump implemented in his first term, like Remain in Mexico and building the border wall, were working and would work again. Here’s Perez.
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PAUL PEREZ: This can be stopped. There is a playbook. President Trump had it, and he still has it. They can make this happen.
GILES: At the border, Vance also pointed to unused materials strewn along the fence and promised to resume work if Trump is elected.
SHAPIRO: How does the Harris campaign respond to those claims? What’s her message to voters like those down there at the border?
GILES: So Harris has been trying to remind people of her roots as a prosecutor. She was attorney general of a border state, California. In fact, the first trip she took after taking office in 2011 was a tour of a drug-smuggling tunnel in Imperial County along the California-Mexico border. We heard some of that from Harris at a rally in Georgia earlier this week.
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VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: I have prosecuted transnational gangs, drug cartels, and human traffickers who were illegally entering our country. I have prosecuted them case after case, and I have won.
GILES: Nonetheless, Republicans see this as a weak point for the Harris campaign and can be expected to make more trips to the border to attack Harris over the next three months.
SHAPIRO: You’ve been covering presidential campaigns in the Southwest. How big of an issue is the border for voters in states like Arizona and Nevada?
GILES: In some border communities, like here in Cochise County, this is the issue that matters to them in November. Border enforcement will also literally be on the ballot in November. Republican state legislators here have mentioned a ballot measure that, like the Texas law, would empower local law enforcement to apprehend illegal border crossers. Republicans have used this as a cudgel to bash Biden and now Harris for what they call a crisis at the border.
Harris’s campaign has reprised a Biden campaign strategy to fight back, focusing on the failed border security bill that Biden agreed to sign earlier this year. Harris, like Biden, blames Trump for discouraging Republicans in Congress from voting for the bill.
SHAPIRO: That’s Ben Giles from NPR in Arizona. Thank you.
GILES: Thank you.
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