The people who comment on C-Span’s morning call-in shows share two characteristics: (1) clearly they are all a bit crazy (and some are totally out of their minds) and (2) they vote. Those who call in as Republicans share an additional characteristic: they are scared to death of Democrats because of what they believe is an open border. This is their most consistent point.

They are convinced that there are no controls at the border for many reasons: (1) The Democrats won’t complete Trump’s magic border wall, (2) the Democrats want to change the face of America, (3) among those coming into the country are murderers, rapists and terrorists, (4) those coming into the country are given benefits beyond those of citizens, (5) once they come into the country, they simply “disappear” and avoid legal proceedings, (6) they are coming into the country to vote Democratic, (7) we cannot afford to take care of them, and so forth.

It doesn’t make any difference as to whether there are factual arguments against any of these points. It doesn’t make any difference that this country’s immigration laws are out of date, but are still our laws. What’s happening in the rest of the world to cause this migration surge is unimportant.

This is the most serious danger to the United States today, they say, and, yes, only Trump can fix it.

It is my fear that the Republicans, disorganized as they clearly are, will win the presidency in 2024 with their candidate Donald Trump as a result of the border issues, and no others.

I told this to a friend last night and she said “No, there’s a counter balance – abortion. The Democrats will win because of abortion.” Maybe, I don’t think so.

When you look at current polls, as I tend to do on Realclearpolitics.com, you see that the presidential race is 50-50, and when it is not 50-50, you normally see Trump leading by 2 to 4 points. For most of us, this is unthinkable and incomprehensible. How can this be after we see what four years of Trump brought us, and after Trump has been indicted in 91 felony counts? Well, unthinkable or not, this is where we are.

Sure the polls could change (and probably will, many say), sure serving presidents often poll poorly at this time (many say), sure the pollsters may not be talking to a representative selection of people, sure, sure, sure. But what else is sure is that all of this polling, done by many national polling organizations, does show remarkable consistency.

The border situation may be important, but it isn’t the only point brought up by the C-Span callers. The next in order seems to be the economy generally – inflation at the grocery store and the gas pump. To me, this should be easier to answer than the border. Grocery and gas prices have risen world wide – a lot of this the result of the war in Ukraine, which has greatly affected agricultural production around the world, and led to strange machinations in oil prices – and the United States looks better than virtually any other country. In addition, some of the policy issues promoted by these callers would have the opposite effect than what the promoters think would be the result. You would think that these arguments could be blunted, although the Democrats have not yet figured out the right words. Similarly, the national debt – it can be shown that the Republicans tend to increase the debt more than the Democrats, even though this is hard for some to believe. And again the Democrats don’t know how to put their case forward.

But it all comes back to the border. And here, I don’t think that the Democrats really have any talking points that could work, no matter how well they might be presented. The fact is not that the border is “open” (it clearly is not), but we do have many too many people coming across it. The Democrats need to admit this, to agree with their critics on this point. And they need to have a plan to deal with it. What should the plan include? Better border security (it’s ok, if part of that includes fence improvements or additions), more border personnel, more immigration judges and court personnel, more shelters, better ways to track migrants who are subject to court proceedings, and so forth. And it’s insufficient to say that our current laws are outmoded – what are the changes that should be made? And perhaps there has been too much energy expended on saving the job of Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Mayorkas may be doing the best job possible. I don’t know. But he has become a target, and okay, let’s remove him as a target. The Democrats should have an active program that they can put forth.

The Republicans can’t fix themselves, but they know how to convince people that they can fix everything else. The Democrats need to be able to be just as convincing – they won’t convince the majority of Republicans, to be sure……but they don’t have to. They just need to convince, say, 10% of those who today say they will vote again for Trump rather than Biden.

And then there’s the question of whether Biden should be the candidate – there’s no polling on a race between Trump and anyone else. But the results of polls like that may be surprising.