“A Flood of Voters for Them”: Replacement Fantasies and Democratic Distortion in the 2024 Election

ABSTRACT This article explores how the 2024 Trump campaign persistently invoked the so-called “great replacement” narrative to promote a politics of racial fear. As the article details, this messaging relied upon the mutability of the replacement narrative – highlighting a supposed plot by the Democratic Party to “import voters” from Latin America in order to corrupt the democratic process. This strategy yielded a variety of civic costs. By foregrounding the language of democracy, the campaign laundered xenophobic fears for widespread consumption. More broadly, the article details how this episode illustrates a core strategy of far right media politics: to capture and repurpose the civic language of liberal democracies to serve illiberal aims.