Immigration cuts into GOP message on taxes
Republican leaders wanted to tout the sixmonth anniversary of their tax cuts this week. The rest of Washington was too busy to join the fanfare.
Instead, to the GOP’s dismay, another issue dominated the headlines: immigration. It was the latest example of the struggle Republicans face in making the tax overhaul — their signature legislative achievement — resonate with voters.
“I haven’t had time to mark this important date,” said Rep. Carlos Curbelo, a Florida Republican involved in the negotiations over an immigration bill and a member of the taxwriting Ways and Means Committee.
With less than five months of campaigning to go until the November midterm elections that will determine control of Congress, taxes don’t rank among the top five mostpressing issues for voters, according to a recent Gallup poll.
Recent spats between President Donald Trump and GOP lawmakers — over immigration policies that separate parents and children illegally crossing the border and additional tariffs on U.S. trading partners — have deflated the legislative euphoria Republicans briefly felt after passing the tax cuts. It’s a common theme — last year, indictments and guilty pleas in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign competed with the rollout of the tax legislation.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., used events this week to showcase the tax cuts, calling them a “game-changer for people in this economy.”
On Wednesday, he put forth other top Republicans, who also tried to highlight the positive effects of the tax cuts. Almost every question the lawmakers received was about immigration.
Just a day earlier, Sen. Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican who led the Senate’s tax cut charge, gave a speech praising the law.
At that moment, every network was focused on Trump, who was about to sign an executive order that ended the policy of separating undocumented immigrant children from their parents.
“I run campaigns all over the country and in every poll we run — in every district, no matter where it is — the No. 1 issue for Republicans is immigration. It’s not even close,” said Harlan Hill, a GOP consultant and adviser to Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign.
Approval of the Republican tax law has slipped six points in the last two months, according to a Monmouth University poll released this week. The survey found that 34 percent of Americans approve, while 41 percent disapprove.
Several surveys show approval of the law falling after increasing earlier in the year, following favorable coverage about companies using their corporate tax-cut windfalls to give raises and bonuses to workers.
But those gains have since faded and Democrats have continued to hammer what they deride as a “Republican tax scam” that has disproportionately benefited executives and wealthy Americans.
Perceptions of the tax law aren’t positive even in Republican-dominated states — a Quinnipiac University poll of Texas voters taken in April found that 43 percent of voters there approved while 45 percent disapproved of the law.
Republican strategists who had hoped to focus their fall campaigns on the tax law are having second thoughts.
“It’s not hard to run on taxes so long as the economy is doing well,” said Jason Fichtner, senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
“But it’s hard to go out and talk about tax law changes when it’s drowned out by trade, immigration, detainments, malfeasance and potential abuses of power by officials,” Fichtner said.