MAGA proposal could doom Republicans in key swing state: GOP strategist

"War Room" host Steve Bannon at the 2023 Turning Point Action Conference in West Palm Beach, Florida (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)

Steve Bannon, host of the "War Room" vodcast and former White House chief strategist in the first Trump Administration, recently called for militarized U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to "swarm the polls" in the 2026 midterms. And he isn't the only far-right MAGA Republican making that proposal.

Two GOP lawmakers serving in the Arizona Legislature, State Sens. Jake Hoffman and Wendy Rogers, have introduced a bill calling for "a federal immigration law enforcement agency" to have a "presence at each location within this state where ballots are cast and deposited."

But conservative GOP strategist Barrett Marson thinks that's a bad idea and could discourage Latinos in Arizona — including those who vote Republican — from showing up on Election Day.

The Bulwark's Andrew Egger described the Hoffman/Rogers proposal as "inviting ICE to the polls."

"If the goal is just to get more law-enforcement eyeballs on voting precincts," Egger writes, "why tap in immigration enforcement in particular?"

In the United States' 2024 presidential election, Democratic strategists were quite frustrated by Donald Trump's gains with Latinos. Democratic nominee and then-Vice President Kamala Harris outperformed Trump among Latinos, but not by much: Harris won 51 percent of Latino voters compared to 48 percent for Trump.

Marson believes that discouraging Latinos from voting is the last thing Republicans should be doing in a key swing state like Arizona, which Trump won in 2016 and 2024 but lost to Joe Biden in 2020.

Marson told The Bulwark, "This is no doubt an attempt at pure intimidation of the Latino voting community" — sarcastically adding, "From a political standpoint, nothing says 'We are trying to attract more Latinos into voting for Republicans' like showing how we can suppress the Latino vote."

Former Arizona Republican Party Chair Gina Swoboda, who is running for Arizona secretary of state in the 2026 midterms, is also condemning the Hoffman/Rogers proposal as bad for the GOP.

In an official statement, Swoboda wrote, "When the Black Panthers stationed outside Philly polling places the GOP objected — some voters may have felt intimidated," she said in a statement, referring to an incident during the 2008 general election. This is no different. The SECOND a voter hesitates to enter a polling place because they are afraid, they have been, by definition, intimidated. That is WRONG."

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