Latino voters question the “great replacement” theory.

Indeed, the massive surge in Latin American immigration that began in the 1970s coincided with the greatest wave of Republican electoral triumphs since the Great Depression. Either the “great replacement” plot is bullshit or the plotters are the most inept incompetent people since Larry, Curly and Moe.

But that doesn’t stop Trump from repeating the accusation.

“A lot of illegal immigrants coming into the country, they’re trying to get them to vote,” the former president fumed during a debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. “They can’t even speak English. … These people are trying to get them to vote. And that is why they are allowed to come to our country.”

This accusation has been peddled for years by anti-immigrant provocateurs such as Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter. Now he’s even being flogged by House Speaker Mike Johnson, who declared that “Democrats… want to turn illegal aliens into voters” and by Elon Musk, who warned that “Dems are deliberately importing voters” and “accelerating” citizenship for migrants in order to “reverse all the swing states, moving the entire country under permanent one-party rule.”

Yet even Musk’s billions have uncovered no evidence of this vast conspiracy to illegally bring migrants to America in order to turn them into Democratic voters. This is not because the evidence has been cleverly hidden, but because the claim is false. However, tens of millions of Americans now agree that the “great replacement” theory is real. In a 2022 poll conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 1 in 3 respondents said there was a program to “replace Native Americans with immigrants for electoral gains.” Unfortunately, the willingness to believe lurid or defamatory slurs about immigrants has a long, long history.

But what makes this particular mania so strange is the fact that this year’s Latino voters are turning out for Trump and the Republican Party on every measure at a rate no one has ever seen before. In what Michael Barone, a veteran political analyst and historian, calls a “tectonic political shift,” there has been a nationwide surge in GOP popularity among nonwhite voters, “which could help Trump move into several target states with large percentages of Latinos.” especially Arizona and Nevada. Barone quoted veteran California political consultant Mike Madrid, who was amazed by the striking increase in the number of Latino voters who changed their registration to Republican. “I have never seen anything like this in 30 years,” wrote Madrid on X.

Without a doubt, the majority of Latino voters remain Democratic. However, this majority is much smaller than in recent decades. Election Day exit polls showed that 66 percent of Latino voters cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and 71 percent for Barack Obama in 2012. In contrast, Harris this year has the support of just 56 percent of Latino voters in the latest “New New New New York Times Poll” – and according to NBC News, even fewer (54%).

What accounts for Democrats’ waning influence on Latino voter loyalty? Some progressives attribute this to Latino immigrants from leftist dictatorships such as Cuba and Venezuela. But as political scientist Yascha Mounk notes, “the shift away from Democrats was also clear in districts that are predominantly Mexican-American, such as southern Texas.”

The most likely explanation for Republicans’ growing loyalty among Latino voters is the simplest: More and more of them agree with Trump’s views and like his style. Republicans are displacing Democrats because the party of the working class and Latino voters across the country are overwhelmingly in that camp.

There is no “great replacement” conspiracy. It never was. Trump’s theory is nonsense. The proof, the irony of ironies, is that the Latino immigrants he so scathingly condemned might just make him the next president of the United States.

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Jeff Jacoby can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on X @jeff_jacoby.