FIRST ON FOX: Vice President Kamala Harris' posture on the southern border crisis is set to haunt down-ballot Democrats in the November election, with Arizona Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake previewing the GOP's attack in battleground states following the Democratic ticket shakeup.
"Ruben Gallego and Kamala Harris: Bad for the border. Bad for Arizona. Bad for America," a narrator says in Lake's first ad of the general election campaign. The words appear over footage of Rep. Ruben Gallego, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Arizona, and Harris hugging.
The video also slammed Gallego for his record of voting with President Biden and Harris 100% of the time in the 117th Congress between 2021 and 2022, according to FiveThirtyEight.
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The ad is part of a $10 million ad reservation previously announced by Lake in May.
Harris is seen in the video saying that she does not think the U.S. should treat people who "cross the border as criminals." The footage is from a 2019 appearance on "The View" during her bid for the Democratic nominee for president in the 2020 election.
"We're not going to support a border wall that is not needed," Gallego says in subsequent footage. The statement from the Arizona Democrat was made on CNN in 2018.
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In the next clip, Harris was asked by a CNN anchor whether she agreed with calls to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to which she replied that, "we need to probably even think about starting from scratch."
The then-senator said, "I think there is no question that we’ve got to critically reexamine ICE and its role and the way it is being administered and the work it is doing," prior to the remark in 2018.
A 2017 comment from Gallego describing the border wall proposed by former President Trump as "stupid" and "dumb" during a speech on the House floor is then played in the ad. The representative was criticizing the Trump administration for seeking to use military construction funds to continue the wall as the building process was otherwise stalled by Congress.
"Ruben Gallego is a Marine combat veteran whose number one priority is securing our border and keeping Arizonans safe, which is why he is fighting tirelessly to hire more Border Patrol agents, fix our broken asylum system, crack down on fentanyl trafficking, and invest in proven technology — all to increase our border security," a campaign spokesperson told Fox News Digital in a statement.
"Meanwhile, Kari Lake is a power-hungry liar who will do or say anything to gain power, even if it means opposing a bipartisan, Border-Patrol backed bill to finally address the border crisis."
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The Harris campaign referred Fox News Digital to her remarks at a recent Georgia rally, during which she pledged to the crowd, "As President, I will bring back the border security bill that Donald Trump killed, and I will sign it into law and show Donald Trump what real leadership looks like."
Trump was blamed by many for squashing a bipartisan negotiated border security bill and preventing it from garnering enough support to advance. However, Senate Republicans have pushed back on this, suggesting several of the measure's components were non-starters. When the measure came for a test vote in May, two of the three negotiators, Sens. James Lankford, R-Okla., and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., voted it down.
Lake similarly argued that the bill did not secure the border and was a "complete joke."
Gallego said he would have supported the bipartisan negotiated bill, slamming Lake for her opposition.
Lake officially won the Republican nod for Senate on Tuesday, defeating Sheriff Mark Lamb. Gallego ran for the Democratic nomination unopposed. Current incumbent Sinema revealed earlier this year that she would not be seeking re-election. She was first elected to the seat in 2018 as a Democrat before switching her party affiliation in 2022.
The Arizona Senate race is rated "Lean Democratic" by non-partisan political handicapper the Cook Political Report, alongside races in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania featuring vulnerable incumbent Democratic Sens. Tammy Baldwin and Bob Casey.
