In the weeks before last week’s election, President Donald Trump couldn’t stop talking about the caravan of migrants that was about to “invade” America. He filmed a racist — and inaccurate — commercial that even Fox News refused to air. He sent U.S. troops to the U.S.-Mexico border.
Trump and other Republicans darkly warned Americans that the caravan includes terrorists from the Middle East. This is not true. In fact, thousands of Central American migrants, including many children, are trying to make the 1,000-mile trek to find better opportunities and avoid persecution. Many will never make it to America.
Now that the election is over, mentions of the caravan from Trump are few and far between.
Color us cynical. We predicted this would happen, that the distant caravan was simply a prop used by Republicans to try to scare voters into casting ballots for them.
Lo and behold, that is exactly what happened.
Fox News spent more than 33 hours discussing the caravan through Election Day, according to analysis by Media Matters. On Oct. 23, it devoted nearly four hours to the topic, a daily high.
On the day after the election, the network had no stories about the caravan. The next day, it devoted less than five minutes to it.
It wasn’t just Fox, The Washington Post and New York Times also had numerous front-page stories about the caravan before the election. They’ve since had only a handful.
The Bangor Daily News published nine news stories about the caravan between Oct. 1 and Election Day and one story about the caravan and Trump’s asylum restrictions after the election.
So, what happened? Essentially the caravan — the bulk of which remains 1,000 miles away from the U.S.-Mexico border — was no longer a useful talking point after the election. It wasn’t an especially effective tactic either as many of the Republican candidates who made xenophobia a centerpiece of their campaigns lost on Nov. 6. They include Eric Brakey, a candidate for U.S. Senate, who made wildly inaccurate — and offensive — claims about immigrants. He received 35 percent of the vote; Angus King won re-election.
There is precedent for using fear of immigrants to appeal to voters. The migrant caravan is the Ebola scare of the 2018 election. In 2014, Republicans ginned up fears of Ebola to scare voters into supporting their law-and-order candidates.
Maine was at the epicenter after a nurse who had been exposed to the virus was detained in Newark, New Jersey, in late October. Then-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, then the head of the Republican Governors Association, allowed the nurse, Kaci Hickox, to return to her home in Fort Kent, where she was quarantined, even though she never tested positive for Ebola.
Gov. Paul LePage demonized Hickox and tried to restrict her movements. An Aroostook County judge ruled that the state had not shown that such actions were necessary. In his order, the judge noted the irrational fears of Ebola and “misconceptions, misinformation, bad science and bad information being spread from shore to shore in our country” about the virus.
Days later, LePage was re-elected.
Soon after that election, politicians stopped talking about the illness and media coverage of Ebola essentially evaporated.
The same thing happened with the migrant caravan. This puts the media in the awkward position of reporting what the president says, but, at the same time, giving credence to unfounded fears. Voters, it appears, are increasingly able to see through the xenophobic rhetoric and to focus on issues that matter most to them, which was health care in this election.