Make Replacement Great Again

The Great Replacement is A: A crazy GOP conspiracy theory? Or B: The Grand Strategy of the Democratic Party?

As we’ve all been told, the Great Replacement is a just a myth, a paranoid Republican conspiracy theory. It’s also been the Grand Strategy of the Democratic Party in recent decades, which Democrat-aligned media discuss openly in the news columns of the Washington Post.

But don’t mention “immigration!” Instead, demographic change has nothing to do with immigration policy. It’s a force of nature, much less under our control than climate change.

From the Washington Post news section:

Democrats dream of a Blue Texas. What will they wake up to in November?

If Texas flips, it would change everything. But the longstanding prophecy has never quite come true.

By Ben Terris and Jesús Rodríguez

October 21, 2024 at 5:00 a.m. EDT

… After [Beto] O’Rourke’s 2018 run, Elaine Kamarck and many other academics became convinced that the Republican stranglehold on Texas was loosening.

“Demography is destiny,” says Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “You can’t undo what’s happening in Texas demographically. The White population is decreasing. The Hispanic population is increasing. It’s just that the Hispanic population is a young population. As we know, young people don’t vote as often as older people do and nor do they run for office as often.”

Don’t mention the I-word!

Indeed, the text string “migra” doesn’t appear in this lengthy article about demographic change in Texas.

The oft-promised idea of a Blue Texas is built on trends and assumptions: As new Latino voters age into regularly casting ballots, they will favor Democrats at a higher rate than the White Republicans whom they are replacing.

But it’s not a Great Replacement.

… By the turn of the century, the GOP had every statewide office, and it’s stayed that way ever since.

The Texas electorate of the future could end that reign, and not just locally. A Blue Texas in the electoral college could make it virtually impossible for a Republican to win the White House. …

The Latino population in Texas has indeed boomed in recent years,

Why?

Who knows?

That’s just the way things have to be. It’s not like you could pass laws or, much less, enforce existing laws to slow the Hispanic take-over. That’s crazy talk.

and in 2022 Latinos overtook Whites as the largest population group in the state.

The problem, for Democrats, is that demographic voting patterns do shift. And since Donald Trump took over the GOP, they’ve been shifting his way.

Since 2016, Republicans have made gains with Latinos. In 2022, the GOP flipped an overwhelmingly Latino district in South Texas that had never been represented by a Republican, electing Rep. Monica De La Cruz.

It’s almost as if Trump appeals to less-educated voters, and, boy, are Latinos less-educated.

Overall, Texas Latinos still tend to prefer Democrats, but their advantage may be vanishing: 58 percent voted for Biden in 2020; the recent New York Times/Siena poll found 49 percent of likely Latino voters in Texas planned to vote for Harris, while 43 percent would vote for Trump. (In the same poll, Allred led Cruz with Latinos by a slightly greater margin: 49 to 36.)

Demographics are just one ingredient for change, said Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, who once ran for Senate in Texas and is now president of NextGen America, a youth voter advocacy group. Democrats haven’t spent enough time or money trying to turn out the 12 million Latinos spread across Texas, she said in a phone interview.

How many hundreds of articles have I read over the decades in which the reporter phones some ethnic activist paid to run the Future Latino Overlords of Norte America or whatever and the activist immediately begins complaining that the Democrats aren’t giving him enough money to carry out the Great Replacement?

They could make strides with many of those voters if they appealed to Latinos with a populist economic message. …

Chuck Rocha, a former senior adviser for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns and a native of Tyler, Tex., criticized Democratic candidates for not hiring Latino Texans who could help them speak to those Latino-heavy communities — something Republicans have been better at doing, he said.

Moar money now for professional Latino activists say the experts, professional Latino activists.

“Folks will say, we don’t have trained people in Texas that are Latino that could do those jobs,” Rocha said. “And I call bulls---. You lose some cultural competency when you expect a well-intentioned White person from Middle America to come to the Texas Valley and understand that culture.”

This points back to a bracing truth for Democrats hoping for change in Texas: They cannot just sit back and wait for demographic destiny. Manifesting Blue Texas will take work.

Make Replacement Great Again!

“I think often it’s been assumed, for example, that demographic changes alone would solve this problem,” said Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Tex.) in an interview. “And I believe this election is once again showing the state Republican effort. They’ve done a good job of co-opting many Latinos, appealing to them. And so the fact that Texas may one day be a Latino-majority state or certainly a Latino-plurality state is no guarantee that it is a blue state.”

The other big problem for Democrats in assembling their Coalition of the Fringes is that their assemblage of miscellaneous groups don’t much like either, and the Latinos especially don’t like the two pushiest groups currently on the top of the Democrats’ Pyramid of Privilege: blacks and transgenders.