Paul C. Pauley sees himself as a moderate Republican – who, however, also happens to believe in one of the most vicious right-wing conspiracy theories about illegal border crossings: that the Democrats are bringing undocumented immigrants into the country so that they will vote for their party.
“I don’t think they’re going to get the votes this year,” said Pauley, who sells evergreens on a family farm near Warren, Ohio. “But in four years? In eight years?”
Former President Donald J. Trump and his running mate, Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, are promoting this idea to mobilize their supporters in fear of a foreign “invasion.” But demographers and population scientists say there is no evidence to support this claim. Moreover, it is even more absurd to imagine Democrats in Washington circumventing border rules, authorities and infrastructure to allow illegal immigrants to enter the country, help them settle, and then let them vote, whether legally or illegally.
Election, court and law enforcement officials who have tracked reports of voter fraud have found no evidence of widespread fraud and said the number of noncitizens who cast their ballots incorrectly is negligible. It is a crime for noncitizens to attempt to vote in federal elections.
More than a dozen cities and towns, most of them in deep blue areas, allow foreign nationals to vote in local elections regardless of their immigration status. This is justified, state and local politicians say, because illegal immigrants pay taxes comparable to those of locals and strengthen their economies. Many immigrants wait years to become naturalized and then fail to register to vote or cast their ballots.
But that hasn’t stopped Trump and Vance from emphasizing that claim in media appearances and campaign rallies, fueling a conspiracy theory that is at the heart of Trump’s lie that the last election was stolen from him. They are using that theory to criticize the Biden administration’s border policies and to portray Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, as a failed “border czar,” misrepresenting her role.
Mr. Vance has made the conspiracy theory a staple of his campaign speech, going so far as to claim in interviews that Democrats believe they can “replace” native-born Americans, a phrase that has been used by the perpetrators of several mass shootings. At recent rallies in Arizona and Nevada, he said Ms. Harris would give every illegal immigrant the right to vote and “destroy” Americans’ say in their own country. “When she let millions of illegal immigrants into the country, our communities became less safe — but it gave Democrats a lot of voters,” he said on Wednesday in Byron Center, Michigan.
Asked to provide evidence for Trump’s claim that Democrats are allowing immigrants into the country to vote, Karoline Leavitt, the campaign’s national press secretary, pointed to local efforts to allow noncitizens to vote. She added, “The Democrats are not even trying to hide their plans to influence the election.”
Vance’s campaign declined to comment. He dismissed criticism of his comments and said he had nothing against immigrants. “Of course I’m married to the daughter of immigrants,” he said on a radio show last month, referring to his wife, Usha Vance, whose parents are from India.
A road trip through Mr. Vance’s backyard in a part of northern Ohio offers a glimpse into how her claims about immigrant voting rights, long amplified by right-wing media and Trump allies, have resonated with a mass of voters. Although Republicans have sought to downplay some of the most extreme voices promoting 2020 election denial, distrust in the electoral system simmers.
The claim that Democrats are helping immigrants enter the country illegally in the hopes they will vote for their party found widespread support in interviews with dozens of voters in Ohio. Ohio is one of several states that have purged hundreds, if not thousands, of people from the voter rolls and passed laws banning illegal immigrants from voting. From a once-booming steel region in the state’s northeast to urban areas where the Latino population has grown sharply in recent years, the theory has resonated not only with Trump’s ardent supporters but also with right-leaning independents.
Barb Glass, 55, an independent, watched a Mahoning Valley Scrappers baseball game with her husband in Niles and said the rising number of migrants in the cities made her suspect a government conspiracy.
“Why wouldn’t they do that?” Ms. Glass said of the Democrats. “Anything that advances their agenda, which is to get into office and stay there.”
And in Medina, near Cleveland, Phil Syverson and his wife, Leona, both Republicans, said they believed Trump and Vance on this point.
“To me, the Democrats are deceitful and will use any means possible to stay in office,” Syverson said as the pair strolled through the county fair. “That’s obvious.”
Mr. Pauley in Warren said he would not go as far as Mr. Vance in believing that Democrats wanted to “replace” native-born Americans. But he was sure that the Biden administration was not screening migrants allowed into the country and that authorities were overlooking illegal border crossings.
“There must be a reason why they let so many people in,” he said.
Mr Trump raised the threat of illegal immigrants voting during his 2016 campaign when he was trailing in national polls. Even after his victory, he blamed his popular vote loss on millions of illegal immigrants, claiming without evidence that they voted for Hillary Clinton. A White House commission he appointed to investigate the claim found no evidence to support it.
But as a 2020 Times investigation found, commission members and Trump’s allies continued to promote the theory of voter fraud to disempower voters ahead of that year’s election.
In the 2022 midterm elections, several candidates have maintained that claim. Among them was Mr. Vance, who galvanized his Senate campaign in Ohio with an endorsement of Mr. Trump and a television ad that drew national backlash for depicting the conspiracy. “Are you a racist? Do you hate Mexicans?” Mr. Vance says tongue-in-cheek in the ad, before falsely accusing the news media of censoring conservatives who support Mr. Trump’s immigration policies. “Joe Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans by bringing more illegal drugs and more Democratic voters into this country.”
As the number of migrants crossing the border illegally skyrocketed in the early years of the Biden administration, the conspiracy theory mixed with other falsehoods and exaggerations about migrants entering through “open borders” and receiving free health care, money and luxury housing.
Most Republican and right-leaning independent voters in Ohio who supported the claim about migrants and voting in interviews said their concerns only arose during the Biden administration. Many said they heard the claims in right-wing media.
Some voters – mostly white Ohioans over 60 – expressed concern about the changing face of their communities and said they believed Democrats were trying to change the country’s demographics to their advantage.
Demographic and cultural changes in Ohio over the past decade have created favorable conditions for the spread of the conspiracy theory.
In the northeastern Mahoning Valley, where steel production once boomed, resentment toward foreigners began to develop years ago as manufacturers closed factories and shipped jobs overseas. The sentiment was exacerbated by a nationwide opioid crisis that ravaged the area and was falsely blamed on immigrants. That helped push swing counties that had supported former President Barack Obama toward Trump. Elsewhere, around Toledo and Cleveland, the surge in Latino populations over the past decade led to changes that Trump and right-wing commentators had stoked fears about for years.
But outside the echo chamber of conservative and right-leaning Ohioans, the claims about immigrants pose a risk for Republicans. Some voters, especially younger ones, said immigration was not a major concern for them and the conspiracy theory sounded false. Mr. Vance’s claim that Democrats wanted to “replace” native-born Americans with immigrants angered some in a region where many still have Irish, Italian and German ancestry.
Chris Schuler, 29, a pipefitter and Republican who plans to vote for Trump because of his economic policies, sits on a tow truck at a demolition derby in Medina County. He says he knows states have taken measures to prevent voter fraud and noncitizen voting, but he can understand why conspiracy theories are spreading.
“I think the outcome of the last election left a really bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths and caused people to not really trust the electoral system anymore,” he said. “So when they make allegations like that, it’s very easy to get a mass of people to say, ‘You know what? Wait a minute, that might make sense.'”
Glenn Wynn, an independent who attended the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where a gunman tried to assassinate Trump last month, said the “Muslim-led” areas in Minnesota were proof that Democrats were using immigration to gain an unfair electoral advantage. “I really believe they just want 10 million new people in America right now.”
When Mr. Wynn learned of studies showing that it is extremely rare for undocumented immigrants to vote in federal elections, he breathed a sigh of relief.
“This is good news,” he said. “I’m not a conspiracy theorist.”
Chris Cameron contributed to the reporting.
