Ryan Girdusky Updates Us on Immigration and the Midterms

BUCK: Our friend Ryan Girdusky is with us now. He’s a political consultant and founder of the 1776 Project Pac. He’s also got a great Substack. Ryan, thanks so much.

GIRDUSKY: Thank you for having me.

BUCK: So, Ryan, I want to ask you about this, because this was a headline just about a day or so ago in the Daily Mail: “73% of Trump voters think Democrats are trying to REPLACE white people with ‘immigrants and people of color who share their political views’, shock new poll shows.” What does the polling actually show about views on illegal immigration and how this is affecting the midterms and all of that?

GIRDUSKY: Right. So, this poll was taken about the, quote-unquote, “Great Replacement Theory,” which has become very, very popular, especially since the Buffalo shooting, popular among talking heads on cable news. And it found overwhelmingly Americans don’t believe in it: 49% don’t believe, 32% do believe in it, including 73% of Trump voters and 61% of Republicans. Also a third of independents believe it. About this poll and about the whole Great Replacement idea is that immigrants do overwhelmingly vote for Democrats.

In the 2016 election, Donald Trump won the popular vote — the popular vote, not just electoral popular vote — among people who were born in America, but he lost immigrants by 40 points, as did Mitt Romney, as did John McCain, as did George W Bush. Immigrants vote overwhelmingly, more than 2 to 1, for Democrats, and they have and they’re continuing to. Even with the Hispanics, shift those the shift up among Hispanics of Hispanics born in this country.

So that said, though, the idea that it is a Democrat plan to change the demographics of this country, that is true — how it started in the 1960s under Lyndon Johnson when our immigration laws were changed. But it is not true today. Under Donald Trump’s presidency, he brought in more legal immigrants who voted for Democrats than we did under Bill Clinton’s. George W Bush brought in more than Bill Clinton. Many years of Donald Trump’s presidency brought in more than Barack Obama’s.

It’s not a Democrat thing that is doing this. This is a party establishment thing that has sought to bring in huge numbers of people. It is the greatest demographic change in the history of any country outside of a war or maybe, you know, Lebanon bringing in two million Palestinian refugees. Those are the only two times you saw a massive demographic change the way this country has since the 1970s, and there’s been many social studies, including the book Bowling Alone, that found that when demographic changes are so strong and so swift, it causes a depletion in trust in both institutions and trust among individual people.

Not just among people who look differently than you, but people who look the same than you. It is massively high. And if you look at Gallup polling, for example, just one polling, Americans for 40 years have said overwhelmingly — plurality or majority — that they want less legal immigration, not none, but just less than the 1.1 or 1.2 million we have been taking in basically since the eighties. And even Cato — Cato believes in open borders all the time. They want no borders, essentially.

They’re a libertarian organization. They found that 44% of Americans — this was taken last year, 44% of Americans — want a 90% reduction in llegal immigration and 65% want a 50% cut in legal immigration, which would still be a half a million people a year. It’s not like we’re not taking any in. And this is a main driver outside of inflation for Republican voters. This is the issue that made Donald Trump president of the United States.

CLAY: Ryan, there’s so much that we’ve talked about during the course of the show today, and you’ve been on with us a couple of times before, because you have — in addition to all the data that you just shared there — an incredible knowledge of the redistricting universe. That now is complete, and I saw in the Cook Political Report, I think they said that 53 House seats could be up for grabs if you look at the numbers. How many seats do you think are truly going to be competitive now that we have all 435, I believe, congressional districts officially squared away?

GIRDUSKY: Right. Well, I was on your show a while ago when Republicans were having their heads handed to them when it came to redistricting. In the last month and a half, Republicans saw a series of victories when it came to redistricting. They didn’t have to give a second Democrat seat in Louisiana. They didn’t have to change the maps in Alabama. They cleaned their clocks in Florida. The judge, the courts overruled them in New York.

So Republicans had a series of very, very, very good victories when it came to redistricting in a way that they hadn’t previously earlier in the year. I would say probably any Republicans can win anywhere between 230 to 250 seats. I mean, depending on how bad things get and far as inflation goes and if we head into a recession before Election Day — which some experts are saying we could be — they could go up to 255 or 260 seats. It could be that kind of a wave year where they sit on the biggest majority they’ve had since the 1920s.

CLAY: Okay. Sorry. So, for people out there who aren’t following the numbers closely, you’re talking about a 30- to 40-ish seat gain. What would you put the range at right now as we set five months out of potential available Republican seat pickups?

GIRDUSKY: Right. Right now, Republicans are looking at easily 214 seats. Democrats are looking at 188. They could probably… I would say, a good number is probably 245. They’ll sit on a 245-seat majority, give or take a few. But it’s still fairly early. Other seats could win. I think the most they could possibly get — unless everything goes right — is 260.

BUCK: So the pickup would be, Ryan, the range of the pickup?

GIRDUSKY: Sorry. Sorry. The pickup will be about 40 seats.

BUCK: Forty. That’s what we’re saying. That’s what we want to hear the number from you, too. That’s we were hoping for. Ryan, where can people go? Because you’re doing some great work on Substack now. How do they subscribe?

GIRDUSKY: You can go on the National Populist Substack. It’s NatPop.Substack.com. It’s $5 a month, $50 a year, and you can follow me on Twitter @RyanGirdusky.

BUCK: Ryan, thanks so much, man. Always appreciate the expertise.

GIRDUSKY: Thank you.