If Donald Trump wins the presidential election next month, he will almost certainly owe his victory in part to the Hispanic voters among whom his support has been surging. Yet even as he does so, he will doubtless still be raging that millions of migrants, most of them Hispanic, have entered this country as part of a plot to ensure the defeat of Republicans.

A Trump victory would represent the ultimate refutation of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory that he and his allies have been promoting for years. That theory — the claim that native-born Americans are being deliberately “replaced” by undocumented throngs crossing the border from Mexico to boost the voting power of Democrats — is absurd on its face. The Hispanic population of the United States has nearly doubled over the past quarter-century. During that period, Republicans’ political fortunes have blossomed. The GOP has won three presidential elections, controlled one or both houses of Congress in 10 of the last 13 cycles, and routinely held a majority of governorships.

Indeed, the enormous growth in immigration from Latin America that began in the 1970s has coincided with the greatest wave of Republican electoral triumph since the Great Depression. Either the “great replacement” plot is hogwash, or the plotters are the most bumbling incompetents since Larry, Curly, and Moe.

But that hasn’t stopped Trump repeating the charge.

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

That accusation has been peddled for years by immigrant-bashing provocateurs like Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter. Now it’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 doing deliberate voter importation” and “fast-tracking” the citizenship of migrants in order “to flip all swing states, shifting the whole country to permanent one-party rule.”

Not even Musk’s billions, however, have uncovered any evidence of this vast conspiracy to bring migrants to America illegally in order to turn them into Democratic voters. That is not because the evidence has been cunningly concealed but because the claim is bogus. Nevertheless, tens of millions of Americans now agree that the “great replacement” theory is real. In a 2022 survey by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 1 in 3 respondents said there is a scheme “to replace native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains.” Sadly, the willingness to believe lurid or defamatory libels about immigrants has a long, long history.

But what makes this particular mania so bizarre is that Hispanic voters this year are by all accounts lining up behind Trump and the Republican Party at rates no one has ever seen before. In what Michael Barone, the veteran political analyst and historian, calls a “tectonic political shift,” there has been a nationwide surge to the GOP among nonwhite voters “that may help Trump carry several target states with large percentages of Hispanics” — especially Arizona and Nevada. Barone quoted one experienced California political consultant, Mike Madrid, who marveled at the striking increase in Hispanic voters switching their registration to Republican. “Never seen anything like this in 30 years,” Madrid posted on X.

To be sure, a majority of Hispanic voters remain in the Democratic fold. But that majority is notably smaller than it has been in recent decades. Election Day exit polling found that 66 percent of Hispanic voters cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and 71 percent were with Barack Obama in 2012. This year, by contrast, Harris commands the support of only 56 percent of Hispanic voters in the latest New York Times poll — and even less (54 percent) according to NBC News.

What accounts for Democrats’ dwindling grip on the loyalty of Hispanic voters? Some progressives attribute it to Hispanic immigrants from left-wing dictatorships like Cuba or Venezuela. But as political scientist Yascha Mounk observes, “the shift away from Democrats has also been stark in overwhelmingly Mexican-American districts, for example in the south of Texas.”

The likeliest explanation for the swelling Republican loyalty among Hispanic voters is the simplest one: More and more of them agree with Trump’s views and like his style. Republicans are supplanting Democrats as the party of the working class and Hispanic voters nationwide are predominantly in that camp.

There is no “great replacement” conspiracy. There never has been. Trump’s theory is nonsense and the proof, irony of ironies, is that the Hispanic immigrants he has so scathingly denounced may just make him the next president of the United States.