FIRST ON FOX: A key Republican lawmaker spearheading former President Trump’s outreach to Black voters will debut a six-figure ad buy calling out what he describes as President Biden’s “real record on race” during the CNN Presidential Debate Thursday.

First-term Texas Congressman Wesley Hunt’s Hellfire PAC will air the 60-second ad on Fox News and CNN in major cities in key battleground states including Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin on Thursday night. The ad, which puts a spotlight on several of Biden’s controversial comments on race, is part of Hunt’s strategy to convince Black voters to support Trump in November.

“Joe Biden’s history as a politician reveals a pattern of making explicitly racist comments, authoring and endorsing discriminatory policies, and associating with individuals known as segregationists,” Hunt told Fox News Digital in a statement. 

He announced that Hellfire PAC would begin a national campaign in multiple swing states “to inform voters of Joe Biden’s real history on race.” 

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The Hellfire PAC video begins with Biden’s own vice president, Kamala Harris, questioning his onetime opposition to school desegregation. In an infamous moment from the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, then-rival candidate Harris said Biden, as a freshman senator in 1975, had worked with segregationist lawmakers to oppose “bussing.” 

“You also worked with them to oppose busing,” Harris told Biden during a primary debate, referencing two segregationist senators. “You know there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”

BLACK GOP LAWMAKERS HOLD ‘CONGRESS, COGNAC AND CIGARS’ EVENT IN KEY SWING STATE

Reps. Wesley Hunt (left) and Byron Donalds (right) are hitting the campaign trail to turn Black male voters out for Donald Trump (center).  (Getty Images)

The ad goes on to call into question Biden’s record on civil rights, noting his relationships with segregationist Southern Democrats, including former Sens. James O. Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia. Biden ignited a firestorm in 2019 after he spoke fondly of the “civility” of the old Senate and his ability to work with those he disagreed with, name-dropping those opponents of racial integration. In response to attacks from his then-Democratic rivals, Biden said there is “not a racist bone in my body.” 

The video quotes various cringe-inducing statements from Biden’s lengthy political career, including a campaign event from 2012 when the then-vice president told an audience of Black voters that Republicans are “going to put y’all back in chains.” In another insensitive gaffe quoted from a 2019 campaign event in Iowa, Biden said “poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.” 

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The Trump campaign hosts a Black business roundtable in Atlanta, featuring Reps. Wesley Hunt, R-Texas (far left), Byron Donalds, R-Fla., (center) and former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Dr. Ben Carson (second from right).  (Matt Reidy | Fox News)

Hellfire PAC’s ad also shows Biden describing his old running mate, former President Obama, as “the first sort of mainstream African American who is articulate, and bright and clean — nice looking guy.” 

Hunt, who is Black, told Fox News Digital that no Republican would get away with the things Biden has said.

“If any Republican had even the slightest history that Joe Biden has on race, they would be ostracized, canceled, and excoriated by the media,” he said. “When Democrat President Joe Biden does it, there’s always an excuse, and, when there’s not an excuse, the behavior and the policies are simply memory-holed.” 

The ad will air in Atlanta, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Charlotte, Milwaukee and Detroit during the CNN Presidential Debate. Americans across the country can tune in to the Fox News Channel from 9:00 p.m. ET to 11:00 p.m. ET to watch the CNN Presidential Debate Simulcast. Viewers can also tune into Fox’s live coverage before and after the debate for expert analysis.

Hunt traveled to Atlanta for an event with Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., on Wednesday that the duo calls, “Congress, Cognac and Cigars.” Moderated by former ESPN host Sage Steele, the two Black lawmakers will have a discussion in a cigar lounge and field questions about how Black male voters will impact the 2024 election. 

Hunt told Fox News Digital’s Elizabeth Elkind in an interview that he aims to help Republicans capture 25% to 35% of the Black male vote — a long-shot goal, though one that would spell almost certain defeat for Biden’s campaign. 

Multiple exit polls show Trump having won 19% of Black male voters in 2020, though the vast majority of Black voters still went for Biden.

Fox News Digital’s Elizabeth Elkind, Paul Steinhauser, Joe Schoffstall and Brandon Gillespie contributed to this report.

Get the latest updates from the 2024 campaign trail, exclusive interviews and more at our Fox News Digital election hub.

When President Biden and former President Trump take the stage in Atlanta on Thursday, immigration and the humanitarian crisis at the southern border will almost certainly be a flashpoint.

Many polls show that voters believe Trump is best positioned to address the issue, and he has continuously slammed Biden on it. He has blamed his successor’s policies for the crisis, and filled his social media feeds with missives about crimes allegedly committed by immigrants, referring to them as “Biden Migrant Killings.” He has vowed to deport millions of immigrants who are in the country without legal authorization.

Trump has referred to migrants as “animals” and even suggested they should be turned into mixed martial arts combatants.

“I said, ‘Dana, I have an idea for you to make a lot of money. You’re going to go and start a new migrant fight league, only migrants,’” Trump said before an evangelical Christian conference in Washington, D.C., last weekend, referring to Dana White, head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

Such comments have scored Trump points with his base and beyond.

Biden faces a trickier challenge, allies and advisors say, and needs to hone in on a nuanced message Thursday night that emphasizes the balance between the need for border security and humanity for immigrants who already have entered this country.

“I don’t think it’s an either-or and I don’t think the American public thinks it’s an either-or,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) told The Times this week. “We can and should do both.”

He said Thursday night’s debate will exemplify how “Joe Biden speaks to American people. Donald Trump speaks to his base.”

Matt A. Barreto, a Biden campaign pollster, said an April poll he oversaw found that two-thirds of respondents in key battleground states want “a balanced approach to the immigration system and report high levels of support for policies addressing both border security and paths to citizenship.”

“This is what the president is pushing for and the polling data suggests that’s what the American public wants,” Barreto told The Times. “They want to see a well managed orderly border and they also have tremendous empathy for long-term undocumented immigrants and they want to see them brought out of the shadows.”

Biden has made two moves recently that reflect this balancing act, imposing limits on asylum seekers and clearing a path to citizenship for undocumented spouses of American citizens.

For the third month in a row, respondents to an April Gallup poll cited immigration as the most important problem facing the United States. A recent Washington Post-Schar School of Policy and Government poll of swing state voters found that just 42% of respondents said immigrants who are in the country illegally should be deported. Nearly 60% said they should be offered the chance to apply for legal status.

Still, Trump’s handling of immigration is preferred to Biden’s, 52% to 26%, according to the same poll.

During the debate, Trump is likely to bring up serious crimes allegedly committed by undocumented immigrants.

In one instance, two men from Venezuela who entered the U.S. illegally earlier this year were charged in connection with the death of a 12-year-old girl in Houston. “We have a new Biden Migrant Killing — It’s only going to get worse, and it’s all Crooked Joe Biden’s fault,” Trump said on Truth Social.

But immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than people born in the U.S., studies show. The Times reported earlier this year that Trump was fundraising with Thomas Homan, a former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement who helped implement the widely derided family separation policy.

In response, Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said, “Biden’s reversal of President Trump’s immigration policies has created an unprecedented and illegal immigration, humanitarian and national security crisis on our southern border.”

Leavitt said that if Trump returns to the Oval Office, “he will restore all of his prior policies, implement brand new crackdowns that will send shock waves to all the world’s criminal smugglers, and marshal every federal and state power necessary to institute the largest deportation operation in American history.”

In recent weeks Trump has appeared to modulate, saying on a podcast that immigrants who graduate from American colleges should get a green card. The comments prompted fierce pushback from his allies.

His spokesperson then clarified that not all graduates would be getting green cards, saying it “would only apply to the most thoroughly vetted college graduates who would never undercut American wages or workers.”

Earlier this year, House Republicans heeded Trump’s demands and killed a bipartisan border security bill after months of negotiations in the Senate. The negotiations also exposed divisions among Democrats and reflected the two notes Biden will need to hit Thursday: How to speak to voters who think the southern border is too porous while also emphasizing the contributions of immigrants already in the country.

“Every American should know that Trump proudly killed the strongest bipartisan border bill in a generation — siding with fentanyl traffickers over the Border Patrol and our security,” said campaign spokesperson Kevin Munoz, hinting at an avenue of attack Biden might utilize Thursday.

Padilla opposed the winter compromise because it didn’t include reforms to aid farmworkers and undocumented immigrants already in the country. Biden at the time said he would have signed the deal but it never made it to his desk primarily because of Trump’s opposition.

Even though he didn’t like the deal, Padilla said Biden has done a good job through executive orders and public pronouncements aimed at both securing the southern border and helping people already here. Padilla pointed to a recent executive order that would protect immigrant spouses of U.S. citizens who have lived consecutively in the country for at least a decade. The move allows as many as 500,000 of those immigrants to quickly access a pathway to U.S. citizenship.

Unlike Padilla, Rep. Greg Stanton (D-Ariz.) supported the Senate compromise deal. The former Phoenix mayor viewed it as a good start that immediately spoke to the frustrations of his constituents and would’ve “reestablished operational control” of the border. Stanton has frequently traveled to border stations and ports of entry — often with Republicans — and said that what he has witnessed is unsustainable.

Earlier this month, the Biden administration raised the legal standard for asylum claims and restricted access to asylum for those crossing the border illegally when arrests average higher than 2,500 a day, as has been common.

The change is hampered without additional funding, which the border bill would have provided, administration officials point out. Mexico has agreed to accept migrants from certain other countries, such as Venezuela and Cuba, allowing some to be quickly removed from the U.S. But officials can’t rely on the consistent cooperation of other countries, such as China, to take their citizens back.

Still, after record high arrests at the end of last year, Border Patrol said preliminary data since Biden’s announcement showed arrests had fallen by 25%.

May figures show arrests fell to the third-lowest of any month throughout his presidency.

Customs and Border Protection reported that agents recovered 895 remains of migrants in fiscal year 2022, three times as many as were discovered in 2018. Advocates say the number is a vast undercount.

Stanton said the debate is a moment where Biden can point to these accomplishments and lay out how Republican intransigency has torpedoed any efforts to get more durable fixes. Stanton was at the signing ceremony for Biden’s executive order where he highlighted the work of a formerly undocumented nurse who helped COVID-19 patients during the pandemic. The nurse had benefited from Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.

“Biden understands the fundamentals of saying you need strong border security and appropriate immigration, smart immigration reform,” Stanton said. “Those have always gone together.”

Times staff writer Andrea Castillo contributed to this report.

Former President Trump maintains his lead in a key battleground state in the 2024 presidential election, according to a new poll.

A survey published Tuesday by the AARP finds Trump with a 3-percentage point lead over President Biden in Nevada. Trump is favored by 48% of likely Silver State voters compared to 45% who said they would vote for Biden if the election were held today. 

That narrow lead extends to a more comfortable 7 points if independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is included. Kennedy has not yet qualified for the Nevada ballot and state Democrats have filed a lawsuit that challenges his eligibility.

Trump’s lead is more pronounced among voters over 50, who said they prefer the presumptive Republican nominee to Biden, a Democrat, by double digits (53%-41%). The silver lining for Biden is that he maintains a lead among Hispanic voters in that age demographic, 51% to Trump’s 41%, according to the AARP poll.

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“We have a huge Hispanic population, so that vote will matter,” said Maria Moore, AARP Nevada state director. Hispanics make up 22% of the eligible voter population in Nevada, according to a 2022 Pew Research Center analysis cited in the AARP’s news release. 

Nevada is one of several closely watched states that could very well determine who holds the White House next year. The battleground state has not gone for a Republican presidential candidate since 2004, when President George W. Bush ran for re-election. But Biden only won the state narrowly in 2020, with 50.06% of the vote to Trump’s 47.67% vote share. 

A Fox News poll released earlier this month found Biden trailed Trump by a 5-point margin. 

Republicans are optimistic they can flip the state after current GOP Gov. Joe Lombardo unseated Democratic incumbent Gov. Steve Sisolak in the 2022 election.

Lombardo recently argued that Nevada voters are dissatisfied with Biden’s handling of the economy in a New York Times guest essay.

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Former President Trump points during a campaign rally at Sunset Park in Las Vegas on June 9, 2024. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)

“If recent polling on Democratic candidates in Nevada is any indication, and I think it is, Mr. Biden has a big problem to overcome, because after three and a half years, Nevadans are losing confidence in him to do something meaningful about inflation and housing and are left with the feeling that he just doesn’t get it,” he wrote. 

The AARP survey found only 40% of voters age 50-plus mostly approve of Biden’s job performance, while 59% disapprove. Reflecting on Trump’s first term in office, 56% of voters over 50 approve of what he did as president, while 43% disapprove. 

The survey also asked about Nevada’s U.S. Senate race, in which Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., seeks re-election against Republican challenger Sam Brown, a wounded combat veteran. The poll found Rosen leading Brown among voters of all ages 47% to 42%, bolstered by Hispanic support for Rosen.

“It’s the margin among Hispanic and Latino voters that’s putting Rosen in the lead,” pollster Bob Ward said. 

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Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo, left, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times arguing the economy was driving Nevadans to support Trump over President Biden. (Getty Images)

The top-ranking issues for Nevada voters were the economy, rising food prices, immigration and border security, according to the AARP survey. 

Impact Research pollster Jeff Liszt suggested split-ticket voters will be the deciding factor in the upcoming election.

“When you look at the older voters, 43% are straight-ticket Republican and 35% are straight-ticket Democrat, but 23% are splitting their tickets,” Liszt told AARP. “[That’s] an indicator that there are more voters up for grabs right now than there may have been in recent elections.”

Republican pollster Fabrizio Ward partnered with Democratic firm Impact Research to conduct the survey, which included 1,368 likely voters interviewed between June 12 and 18. The poll’s margin of error is 4%.