It worked for Bush the Elder by tristero

You may recall the Horton commercial, which the elder George Bush ran in his 1988 presidential campaign. It showed a black man who had raped a white woman and assaulted her husband while free on a Massachusetts prison-furlough program that was supported by Michael Dukakis, the Democratic candidate. As a vote magnet, it worked for Mr. Bush. 

[Republican NY Nassau county executive candidate Jack Martin's] mailer shows three shirtless Latino men, covered in tattoos and representing MS-13, the vicious gang begun by Central American immigrants in Los Angeles that now menaces Long Island. “Meet Your New Neighbors!” a headline above them says, adding this about Mr. Martins’s Democratic opponent: “Laura Curran will roll out the welcome mat for violent gangs like MS-13!” Ms. Curran, the text says, is “MS-13’s choice for county executive.”

In the close Virginia governor’s race, an ad for the Republican candidate, Ed Gillespie, links the Democrat, Ralph Northam, to a sanctuaries-cities policy that “let illegal immigrants who commit crimes back on the street, increasing the threat of MS-13.” 

In New Jersey, a plainly desperate Kim Guadagno, the Republican nominee for governor, reached back a decade in a dismal attempt to pin a soft-on-immigrant-crime tag on the Democratic front-runner, Phil Murphy. A Guadagno commercial twists a Murphy comment about undocumented immigrants — his “having their back” — as somehow meaning he supports a brutal killer named Jose Carranza. 

Mr. Carranza, an unlawful arrival from Peru, was one of six men found guilty in the execution-style murder of three young people in a Newark schoolyard in 2007. “Murphy,” the Guadagno ad says, “will have the backs of deranged murderers like Carranza.”