Vice President Kamala Harris will be traveling to the border on Friday, as Leah covered. Not only is Harris also the Democratic nominee, but the failed border czar as well, a title bestowed upon her in March of 2021. When sharing the news on Wednesday night, the Associated Press was out with something of a curious take about Harris' supposed "strength" on the border, though they quickly changed their headline.
As of Thursday afternoon, the AP's headline now reads "Harris will campaign on Arizona’s border with Mexico in attempted show of strength on immigration." Headlines shared by other outlets seem to reflect that change. Originally, however, the headline read that "Harris plans to campaign on Arizona’s border with Mexico to show strength on immigration," according to an archived copy.
While the AP doesn't appear to have shared this article to their X account, Yahoo! News did, and the post went with the original headline, which Republican strategist Matt Whitlock was quick to take notice of.
What “strength?”
— Matt Whitlock (@mattdizwhitlock) September 26, 2024
It’s her biggest vulnerability by a wide margin and visiting reminds everyone how catastrophically she’s failed on the issue. https://t.co/3y9vCZFMdQ
The actual article also notably relies on an anonymous aide to discuss the trip, though even the AP acknowledges the role Harris has played with the border, though they still engage in the same revisionist history that many other mainstream media outlets did:
President Joe Biden tasked Harris with working to address the root causes of immigration patterns that have caused many people fleeing violence and drug gangs in Central America to head to the U.S. border and seek asylum, though she was not called border czar.
Townhall has repeatedly highlighted how Harris' role did, in fact, amount to being the border czar under this administration.
As Whitlock asks, it's certainly worthwhile to question "what 'strength?'" Whether it's "an attempt show" or not, as the new headline now reads, does the Harris-Walz campaign really expect this visit to fix all of the Democratic nominee's problems on immigration?
Polls have continuously shown not only that voters don't approve of the Biden-Harris administration's handling of the issue, but that former and potentially future President Donald Trump enjoys an edge on the issue. As we covered earlier this week, national polls from CNN and Quinnipiac University showed that Trump leads Harris on those issues by 49-35 percent and 53-45 percent, respectively.
"Harris has increasingly tried to seize on the issue and turn it back against her opponent, though polls show voters continue to trust Trump more on it," the AP article admits, after engaging in fearmongering about "mass deportations." It's worth mentioning that a CBS News/YouGov America poll from June found that 62 percent of registered voters support such deportations of illegal immigrants.
That the AP would change their headline is nothing new. Just earlier this month, they were out with a misleading post about Sen. JD Vance's (R-OH) comments on school shootings, claiming he said he referred to them as "a fact of life," when it reality he said that "I don’t like that this is a fact of life" and called for not making schools such soft targets. The damage was still done, with top Democrats, including but not limited to the Harris-Walz campaign, repeating such a misleading narrative about Vance.