REPLACEMENT MESSAGING AS ELECTORAL STRATEGY

It is useful to begin with preliminary distinctions. Although this study focuses on replacement messaging in the context of the United States, this politics of demographic fear has found widespread purchase across the global stage—channeling the resentments that attend a globalized world. Whereas the language typically is associated with the defensive nationalisms of Europe and North America, the terms of replacement thought have been invoked more widely by those seeking to exploit anxieties about migration, identity, and population change. In 2023, for instance, Tunisian President Kais Saied conspicuously argued that the nation was suffering from a “criminal arrangement” that sought “to change the demographic composition of Tunisia” through migration from Sub-Saharan nations (Brown Reference Brown2023). In India, leaders from the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party regularly invoke fear of a Muslim campaign (i.e., a supposed “population jihad”) to undermine Hindu-population majorities through heightened reproduction (Sharma Reference Sharma2024).

In the North American context, variations of the replacement narrative reflect how it is adopted by segments of right-wing and Far Right culture.Footnote ³ The most toxic version typically uses the label of “white replacement” or “white genocide”—in which the core fear reflects how the nation’s white-population majority is shrinking on multiple fronts (Bhatt Reference Bhatt2021; Davis Reference Davis2025; Jackson Reference Jackson, Carmichael and Maguire2015; Kamali Reference Kamali2021). On the one hand, immigration looms large in this fear narrative, as migrants (particularly from Latin America) swell the nonwhite proportion of the nation’s population. On the other hand, critics of demographic change highlight the nation’s birthrates to indict how “native, white Americans” are reproducing at a rate that lags behind the reproductive rates of nonwhite competitors (Bracke and Hernández Aguilar 2020; Chavez Reference Chavez2008, Reference Chavez, Belew and Gutierrez2021). As a result of these two overlapping factors, the nation’s historic white majority is perceived to be in irreversible decline. For this reason, the Far Right persistently cites US Census predictions that the United States will be a majority-minority country by 2045 (Frey Reference Frey2018). The date is presented as less a prediction than a provocation—a call to action for those invested in whiteness as the non-negotiable, racial core of the nation.

This explicitly racialized version of the replacement narrative typically is the most familiar because it has spawned the most notorious episodes of extremist violence. In 2019, a white supremacist—carrying weapons covered with extremist slogans—killed 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand. Later that year, a white supremacist killed 23 people in a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. In 2021, a man intentionally struck a Muslim-Canadian family of five with his vehicle as they crossed the street in London, Ontario. In 2022, a white supremacist attacked a Topps Supermarket in Buffalo, New York, killing 10 Black shoppers and workers. What binds these episodes of horrific violence is that each was motivated by the belief in a replacement plot. Each offender left behind writings in which they explained their reasons for violence against nonwhite, non-Christian others. In each case, the manifesto named ethnic or racial “replacement” as the core motive. They portrayed themselves as soldiers defending the white race (or white nation) within an ongoing “race war” that, so far, has gone unrecognized by the broader public (Barder Reference Barder2021; Feola Reference Feola2024; Hoffman and Ware Reference Hoffman and Ware2024; Kamali Reference Kamali2021).

This study, however, focuses on what might be termed the electoral variant of the Great Replacement narrative, which was deployed consistently in the runup to the 2024 presidential election. The basic argument of this campaign can be stated simply. The nation is not only suffering an immigration crisis due to heightened migration from Latin America. Instead, the ongoing “invasion” (i.e., the term central to Trump’s immigration messaging) ultimately reflects the design of the Democratic Party in its efforts to secure electoral advantage (Beltrán Reference Beltrán2020, 116–18). This version of replacement thought is based in the belief that Latin/x immigrants from the Global South represent a source of reliable Democratic votes. By extension, Democratic plans to liberalize immigration policy or streamline naturalization supposedly reflect a surreptitious campaign for electoral power.

This fear narrative regarding immigration dominated right-wing election messaging. At the most extreme, Trump framed this supposed crisis in terms that reflected guiding tropes of fascist race theory. In a December 2023 rally in Iowa, he notoriously asserted that illegal immigrants are “poisoning the blood of the country”—a claim that he repeated later that day in a social media post (Gibson Reference Gibson2023). The campaign’s more prevalent anti-immigration message, however, channeled the central assertion of the replacement narrative: that Democratic immigration policy represented a deliberate plan to “import voters” and subvert the integrity of national elections. In a 2024 rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, for instance, Trump asserted that “Biden’s conduct on our border is by any definition a conspiracy to overthrow the United States of America,” where the supposed plot aimed to “nullify the will of the actual American voters and establish a new base of power that gives them [the Democratic Party] control for generations” (Barrow and Colvin Reference Barrow and Colvin2024).

These assertions boldly lay out the core logic of the replacement narrative. What might initially appear as a policy failure instead is read as a plot. The conspiracy is supposedly devised by elites who are hostile to the “true” nation. Moreover, the crux of the plot is immigration policy, engineered to prevent “real” Americans from exercising control over their own nation (which instead is passed to nonwhite immigrants). As a result, the narrative fuels what political theorist Cristina Beltrán (Reference Beltrán2020, 116) evocatively termed “a xenophobic resonance machine that continually characterizes Mexicans and other Latinx populations as an invasive force.”

Trump was not alone, of course, in pushing this narrative, because he was joined by a wide variety of conservative media commentators. Elon Musk, then-owner of the social media platform formerly known as Twitter—and perhaps the highest-profile Trump surrogate during the election cycle—routinely posted about a supposed Democratic conspiracy to defraud the election through immigration policy. In one oft-repeated formula, he asserted that “the reason the Democrats have an open-border policy is to import voters” (Musk Reference Musk2024b). Mike Johnson, the Republican Speaker of the US House of Representatives, repeatedly accused the Democratic Party of a covert plan to “turn illegal aliens into voters.” In response, the GOP-led US House crafted the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE Act), which supposedly would preserve the integrity of the nation’s elections by demanding proof of citizenship for voter registration. However, detractors routinely questioned the need for the SAVE Act because US citizenship already was a requirement to vote in federal elections (Bernal and Schnell Reference Bernal and Schnell2024).

What is unmistakable is the significant role played by the tropes of replacement thought in GOP campaign messaging about the nation, immigration, and the border. Whereas the more moderate members of the Republic Party distanced themselves from claims of “replacement” after this ideology spurred episodes of white supremacist violence, the 2024 Trump campaign persistently invoked core elements of the narrative. Many influencers and Trump surrogates, for instance, invoked a conspiracy to “import voters” while avoiding any direct reference to replacement. Others, however, hastened to recuperate the language of replacement itself. For instance, Vivek Ramaswamy—the biotechnology CEO who ran for the Republican presidential nomination—asserted during a nationally televised December 2023 candidate debate that “the ‘Great Replacement’ is not some grand right-wing conspiracy theory but a basic statement of the Democratic Party’s immigration platform” (Wendling Reference Wendling2023). These committed appeals to replacement ideology raise the important question: Was this recuperation simply a revival of xenophobic tropes, continuous with a long tradition of American nativism, or does this episode raise distinct civic costs and dangers?

REPLACEMENT FEARS AND THE RACIAL POLITY

To access these stakes, it is useful to note the features that allowed this narrative to thrive in the Trumpist media ecosystem. As discussed previously, the replacement narrative taps currents of populist rage that have been fomented by leaders across the global Far Right. Specifically, the targets of rage are political elites who supposedly engineer immigration policy to meet their own interests while disenfranchising “natives” of the nation in question (Miller-Idriss Reference Miller-Idriss2020). This theme of dispossession proved instrumental for the Trump campaign, which persistently settled on one message: it is not only that migrants are intentionally being admitted to the nation; these outsiders also are being imported specifically to steal the election from “true” Americans (i.e., in Trump’s terms, the “silent majority”). The trope of theft thus planted the immigration-fear narrative in rich soil within the Trumpist imagination, channeling the fantasy of the “stolen election” that Trump cultivated to refuse the legitimacy of his loss in the 2020 election (Homans Reference Homans2022).

This overlap was not incidental because the charge of theft rests at the core of the “replacement” narrative—more specifically, the contention that the true heirs of the nation are being dispossessed of the goods that they so richly deserve. In the canonical rendering of the so-called Great Replacement, the object of dispossession is the nation itself. Through the supposed “flood” of immigration, the nation has been seized from its white, ethnic core and handed over to nonwhite, non-Christian migrants. The specifics of this narrative reflect the grievance politics that currently binds much of the Far Right (Rosenthal Reference Rosenthal2020). Far Right leaders persistently insist that “our jobs” have been taken and given to nonwhite others—whether located domestically or across the globe through offshoring. In other renderings, the nation’s culture is being stolen through a “war on Christianity.” Ultimately, these claims rest on one core assertion: that those who should possess the nation are under attack by those who seek to take what is rightfully theirs (Abraham and Barreto Reference Abraham and Barreto2024; Bebout Reference Bebout and Bauer2020; Kelly Reference Kelly2020). This theme of victimhood proved a fruitful valence between the replacement narrative and Trump’s long-standing efforts to bind a right-wing coalition around manufactured grievance. As rhetoric scholar Paul Elliott Johnson (Reference Johnson2022, 177–78) elaborated: “Trump encourages his audience to imagine themselves as victims of a political tragedy centered around the displacement of ‘real America’ from the political center” by a wide variety of antagonists (e.g., feminists, liberals, progressives, and migrants). This air of grievance is at the core of Trump’s persistent promise: that he will be a voice to speak for the supposedly “forgotten” Americans.

This broad grievance-politics shapes how the electoral version of “replaceism” constructs its own distinct vision of victimhood. Recall that the good that is ostensibly being stolen is electoral integrity—a core feature of democratic governance. This specter was particularly significant for those who, like Elon Musk, asserted that the survival of democracy in the United States hinged on Trump’s electoral victory. Without a Trump victory, Musk argued, “the Dems [sic] will legalize so many illegals [sic] in swing states that this will be the last real election in America” (Musk Reference Musk2024c). This message was repeated consistently in Musk’s postings in the weeks leading up to the election. It was particularly clear in the video that he reposted and pinned to the top of his profile with the message: “This Is Actually Happening” (Musk Reference Musk2024a). In its opening moments, the video (originally posted by the social media account Western Lensman) promises that it will explain the “Democrat open-borders plan to entrench single-party rule.” From that point, it describes this supposed conspiracy step by step: “One. Flood the country with untold millions of illegals [sic] by land, sea, and air from all over the world.”. Of particular interest for this study are the final steps of this supposed conspiracy: “Five. Count the noncitizens in the census that will determine congressional apportionment in the House of Representatives” and “Six. Lock in the permanent voting majority with campaign promises of lavish benefits and permanent privileges, enshrining generational fealty to the Democrat [sic] Party.”

These examples reveal the plasticity of the replacement narrative. Whereas the most controversial version (i.e., “white replacement” or “white genocide”) foregrounds the racial identity of the nation as the good that is threatened by immigration, GOP campaign messaging highlighted an ostensibly different area of threat: core democratic ideals, reflected in the commitment that democracy is the rule of the people (the demos) over itself. This transposition was used by GOP operatives to defend against the racist resonances of “replaceist” messaging. Yet, as various scholars have pointed out, this ostensibly democratic appeal to a people’s self-governance remains rooted in an invidiously racialized logic (Beltran Reference Beltrán2020; Mondon and Winter Reference Mondon and Winter2020). The central impetus of replacement messaging is not to ask whether “the people” continue to exercise power but rather to pose a different question: Who can count as “the people” at stake and who cannot? Who can be recognized as a member of the demos and who cannot (or must not) be assimilated for that people to remain themselves? The restrictive drawing of these lines yields the internal linkage that Balibar (Reference Balibar2011, 59–60) drew between nationalism and racism, wherein nationalist efforts to secure the “true” core of the demos entail “an excess of ‘purism’…an obsessional imperative which is directly responsible for the racialization of social groups whose collectivizing features will be set up as stigmata of exteriority and impurity.” Stated in simpler terms, this is a logic of nationhood in which race is the master lens through which insiders are determined and outsiders disqualified. As the visual media that surrounded the Trump campaign routinely demonstrated, this effort to circumscribe the demos typically ended in one place: the face of the nonwhite interloper from the Global South, presented as the “false” exterior of the demos—living evidence of a supposed plot to undermine the self-governance of a historically white people.

At the most obvious level, therefore, the 2024 campaign season illustrated how the so-called replacement narrative can be applied selectively in new contexts to shape perception, mobilize sentiment, and guide opinion. The more significant normative issues, however, stem from what this deployment of the narrative enabled. As this discussion demonstrates, the GOP appeal to replacement messaging in the 2024 election cycle reflects a characteristic strategy of Far Right media politics. Specifically, it repackaged illiberal positions through the core terms of liberal democracy, thereby sanitizing the message and broadening its appeal for a wider audience (Miller-Idriss Reference Miller-Idriss2020, 45–68; Stern Reference Stern2019). In this case, replacement messaging used democratic values to cover for racialized panic over the changing composition of the nation. Although the messaging invoked the specter of “permanent one-party rule,” the animating trope of the campaign was not a balance between political factions. Rather, the strategic appeal to replacement thought turned the spotlight on who would be tipping the balance of civic health, who supposedly was “invading” the demos, who was seizing the nation from its proper possessors, and who (as a result) would be dispossessed of their supposed birthright. In doing so, the narrative fueled the characteristic ultranationalist impulse: not simply to identify a supposed threat to the nation but rather to expel the threat so that the demos can be whole and pure again (Revelli Reference Revelli2019, 15–16). In this regard, there is perhaps no clearer illustration than the signs waved by attendees at the 2024 Republican National Convention that read “Mass Deportation Now!” (Yang Reference Yang2024).

The charge of “replacement” has proven to be a potent narrative for Far Right actors, capable of generating rage over social changes and directing this rage against tactically chosen targets (e.g., elites and migrants). Moreover, part of its allure becomes legible in light of anxieties over nationhood in global times. In a time when the sovereignty of nations has been undermined by transnational powers, panic over a changing population reverberates with larger panics over the erosion of Western hegemony. The border crystallizes these anxieties over control, perceived as the site where the nation is porous, weak, and penetrable by bodies from without (Brown Reference Brown2010). What poses as fear about identity thus reflects fear about waning power (and a rearguard desire to reclaim that power). Stepping back from the specifics of replacement ideology, however, this episode reveals something significant about the civic language of democracy—that is, how readily it can be co-opted for reactionary purposes. As Mondon and Winter (Reference Mondon and Winter2020, 5) observed, this strategy is particularly clear in Far Right movements that curry favor by wielding populist tropes and promises—a politics that “manipulat[es] the concept of ‘the people’ to push reactionary ideas in the service of power.” Stated in simpler form, the electoral version of replacement thought reveals how even the most fundamental liberal-democratic norms are not immune to hijack toward regressive aims. Instead, in Miller-Idriss’s (Reference Miller-Idriss2020, 50) terms, such values can be used as a “kind of Trojan horse” to normalize extremist commitments.

It is the character of these illiberal commitments that gives this episode such a troubled air. The turn to replacement politics in the 2024 presidential election cycle did not only present reactionary ideals under a more palatable guise; it also normalized political commitments that historian Geoff Eley (Reference Eley2021) identified as contemporary reverberations of fascism.Footnote ⁴ At the most obvious level, the replacement narrative evokes a staple of fascist ultranationalism, wherein the primary threat to “the people” comes “from the outside, from the exotic and distant elsewhere, and especially from alien people who self-evidently do not belong” (Eley Reference Eley2021, 23). As Eley highlighted, however, this invidious logic of belonging does not simply define the “true people” by distinguishing between native- and foreign-born (the latter of which can never truly be accepted within the popular will). Instead, the “expandable category of the foreign outsider, the dangerously alien other, then becomes effortlessly elided to the racialized populations inside” (Eley Reference Eley2021, 23). From this perspective, this cultivated panic over migration serves an illiberal double duty. What presents as a panic over migration becomes a free-floating lens of disqualification turned on domestic space—targeting those minoritized populations that unsettle a nation historically organized around the normative pole of whiteness. Through this lens, the “false” citizen is not simply the one who comes from without (i.e., the one who can never fully be trusted) but might also be the threat that grows from within, a cleavage drawn through racialized markers of difference. As scholars have noted, it is precisely these racial currents that fueled Trumpist accusations of “voter fraud,” overwhelmingly marshaled against majority-Black cities (Morris and Shapiro Reference Morris and Shapiro2025). When “the people” is structured through racialized terms, these fantasies about democratic fraud can easily be used to target those groups whose citizenship has long been diminished by the racial polity.