Senate candidate Kari Lake pushes 'great replacement theory' favored by white nationalists

Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake claimed without evidence Sunday that Democrats are allowing undocumented immigrants to flood across the border as part of a nationwide plot to pad voter rolls while registering that group for Medicare and Medicaid benefits.

The Republican front-runner echoed the "great replacement theory" favored by white nationalists as she mixed accusations of election fraud with welfare fraud to a credulous Maria Bartiromo on her “Sunday Morning Futures” show on Fox News.

Lake has repeatedly employed these themes, in part to explain her 2022 gubernatorial loss. Lake is currently running for the U.S. Senate seat held by U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee has urged Lake to focus on matters such as inflation and the rising number of illegal immigrant entries, not election denialism. On Sunday, Lake seemed to again conflate the border situation with election outcomes.

Lake initially agreed “a thousand percent” with Bartiromo on the unfounded claim that Democrats are allowing a flood of immigrants in part so they can “vote for the Democrats.” Lake cited Democrats’ resistance to a Republican bill requiring proof of citizenship as evidence of the plan.

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Then Lake went on to suggest the immigrants’ names are added to the voter rolls so an unidentified “they” can vote for the group.

“We’re not going to see all these people showing up at polling places,” Lake said. “What they want is to have a line in the voter rolls so that somebody can vote for that person, and that’s why they are asking them to register to vote when they get set up for Medicare and Medicaid, because they’re giving them all of these services.

“They’re asking them to sign up to vote, then they have a line in the voter roll, and somebody will vote under that name.”

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Such a plan would require breaking federal law. This criminal behavior is alleged despite a consistent lack of evidence.

The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service reiterated in a 2022 report that undocumented immigrants, along with other classes of migrants, are ineligible for Medicaid, the government-funded health program for the poor. They are similarly ineligible for Social Security, which provides retirement and disability benefits, and SNAP, the successor to the program once known as food stamps.

Medicare is the health care program for American citizens 65 and older.

In 2023, KFF, a nonprofit that researches health care policy, polled immigrants of all types and found that half of “likely undocumented immigrant adults” reported being uninsured compared with 8% of American-born adults.

Lake has suggested similar treachery by Democrats many times.

In January, she built on a misleading social media post by billionaire Elon Musk to again hurl charges of a conspiracy theory.

Musk, the owner of X, formerly known as Twitter, tweeted that “no proof of citizenship is required for federal elections” in Arizona. He didn’t note that no states require proof of citizenship, and that Arizona is the only state to require it for state-level elections.

Even so, Lake pounced on Musk’s tweet.

“This is why they had to stop me. My plan to shut down the human smuggling and their open borders policies would thwart their agenda to register illegal voters,” Lake wrote in a tweet of her own.

In 2019, amid a surge in people claiming some form of replacement theory, The New York Times traced the history of the idea. It was popularized by French philosopher Renaud Camus and has found strong support in America among antisemites and other white nationalists.

The “great replacement theory" generally states that welcoming immigration policies, especially those impacting nonwhite migrants, are part of a plot to change the racial mix of a country and to undermine or “replace” the political power and culture of white people. Words like "invasion" are commonly invoked.

The demonstrators in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 who chanted “You will not replace us” echoed the theory.

The gunman in the 2019 massacre in an El Paso Walmart that killed 23 people cited “the Hispanic invasion of Texas” as his motivation.