"I called out Joe Biden for failing us on the border," says James Talarico, Texas' Democratic Senate nominee, in a recent ad airing in the closing stretch of his neck-and-neck race against Republican Ken Paxton. It's the kind of line a candidate delivers when the poll numbers have spoken and the principles have been put on hold.
Talarico isn't alone. Across the 2026 battleground races that will decide control of the Senate and a handful of House seats, Democratic candidates are lining up to disown the man who led their party into the last presidential cycle. Biden's ratings on the border "tanked amid a surge in migrant crossings during his presidency," and Trump "successfully weaponized" that in 2024. Now the party's hopefuls are working to neutralize the damage by throwing the ex-president under the bus.
Who Has the Power
In Kansas, Democrat Adam Hamilton told a debate crowd: "Immigration at the border under Biden was a disaster. That is how we ended up where we are today." Paige Cognetti, running to unseat Rep. Rob Bresnahan in a working-class district around Scranton, Pennsylvania, said Thursday night: "The Biden administration did fail. We need to make sure that the border is secure. It's a good thing that it is." In South Carolina, Senate candidate Annie Andrews put it flatly: "Democrats have failed on the border."
Iowa's Josh Turek went further, traveling more than 800 miles to Laredo, Texas, to film an ad at the border. "I voted with Republicans to allow law enforcement to arrest and deport criminals," he says in it. Weeks earlier, he promised to "work with anyone" to fix immigration, "including President Trump, to secure the border."
The adviser class is cheering. Democratic pollster Celinda Lake called the move "very smart" and said "there's nobody contesting that interpretation" that Biden blundered. Her recommended product: "some control for the border plus a humanitarian process for immigration." Messaging, in other words, tested and packaged.
Who Gets Crushed
The people absent from these ads are the ones living with the consequences. Hamilton and others paired their Biden critiques with warnings that the current president has gone too far on enforcement. Polls show many Americans have soured on Trump's handling of the issue after immigration officers fatally shot two Americans in Minnesota and one in Maine this year. Three people dead at the hands of armed federal agents, and the candidates' answer is a debate over who guards the line more convincingly.
Johnny Garcia, running in Texas' redrawn and Republican-friendly 35th Congressional District, reached for the 2022 smuggling deaths, when 53 migrants were locked in a trailer in south San Antonio, four years ago. He blamed Biden's policies and then added: "So we can't afford to just turn a blind eye to our border. But at the same time, we can't turn a blind eye to what we're seeing happening on our streets." The dead migrants become a campaign talking point; the smugglers' conspiracy and the border that made the trip so lethal go unexamined.
The Election Trap
Biden entered office five years ago and inherited a Covid-era migration surge that intensified after he rolled back Trump-era policies, allowing more asylum seekers to stay in the country as their cases were considered. Even now, with Trump's approval at 38%, border security remains one of his highest-polling issues. Lake says "ICE has gone too far, and that has backfired now." Backfired, as in politically. The measure of harm is the ballot box.
That's the loop. One party builds a vulnerability, the other weaponizes it, and the first sprints to the other's position once the polls shift. Candidates who spent two years watching Republicans accuse them of promoting "open borders" now compete to sound tougher, while the machinery of arrest and deportation stays intact under whichever party holds the keys. For the migrants and neighbors on the receiving end, the choice on offer is between enforcement and slightly more apologetic enforcement.
The party's newfound candor about Biden isn't a reckoning. It's a pivot, tested, polled and delivered in thirty-second spots.
- border security
- joe biden
- democrats
- immigration
- james talarico
- ken paxton
- adam hamilton
- roger marshall