Updated 12:06 AM | Feb. 26, 2016

What Went Down At The CNN Republican Debate

Filed under 2016 Election

Julia Azari

When Did The GOP Get So Focused On Immigration?

It seems like we spent about the first half hour of this debate on immigration. Is this normal? A quick glance at GOP debates 16 years ago reveals that no one mentioned immigration, like, at all. The only person who brought it up really was Gary Bauer, who was a pretty minor candidate. This changed in 2008, and Republican primary debates have featured quite a bit of immigration discussion ever since. Below is a very rough measure of this, with a raw count of debate mentions of the words “immigrant” and “immigration” during each primary season. There are two takeaways from this. First, Trump isn’t totally responsible for a pivot toward this issue for Republicans. It’s not clear whether economic decline, national security concerns, or the exposure of intra-party fissures after Bush’s attempt at immigration reform are the cause of this (or some combination). But there’s a big change between 2000 and 2008. Before we let Trump and the current field off the hook, though, we should also observe that this year’s debates have almost caught up to 2012 in terms of numbers of immigration references – in half as many debates. If the field continues to look like it does, I think we can expect to catch up with the 2008 numbers fairly quickly.

YEAR	NUMBER OF GOP PRIMARY DEBATES	MENTIONS OF THE WORD IMMIGRATION OR IMMIGRANT	MENTIONS PER DEBATE (ROUNDED)
2000	11	2	0.2
2008	16	293	18
2012	20	218	11
2016	9*	191	18

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