Democratic senators are privately acknowledging that their party committed “political malpractice” by bungling the issue of border security, which they view as a driving factor behind President-elect Trump’s sweeping victory and their loss of four Senate seats.

Democratic senators had a long and intense conversation about what went wrong in this year’s election during a recent lunch meeting in the wood-empaneled Mansfield Room just off the Senate floor.

Senators at the meeting offered a variety of theories about why their party got routed on Election Day, despite what many of them see as President Biden’s impressive accomplishments and the strength of the economy.

Many Senate Democrats think that voters’ sour views about Biden’s record was driven by their anger over rising costs. That was probably the biggest factor behind Trump’s victory, they say.

But there’s a growing feeling among Democratic lawmakers that the Biden administration completely mismanaged the huge surge of migrants across the southern border and that this also hurt their party dearly.

“We destroyed ourselves on the immigration issue in ways that were entirely predictable and entirely manageable. We utterly mismanaged that issue, including our Democratic caucus here,” one Democratic senator told The Hill.

“That’s political malpractice. That’s not someone else’s fault. That’s not the groups pushing us around,” the lawmaker added.

Some Democrats think Biden made a huge mistake when in May of 2023 he lifted Title 42, the emergency health order Trump had put in place to block migrants from entering the country to seek asylum. Biden’s decision allowed millions of migrants to stay in the country while their asylum cases slowly moved through the courts.

Senate Democrats tried to find political cover on the issue by blaming Trump for defeating the bipartisan border security bill they negotiated with Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) in February.

When asked about Biden’s border record, vulnerable Democratic candidates would argue that Senate Democrats had crafted a bill to reform the asylum process. They said that bill gave the president broad new power........

© The Hill