On Sunday, two days before the Presidential election, Donald Trump made five campaign stops, in five states: Iowa, Minnesota, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. In Michigan, Ted Nugent served as the warmup act; in Virginia, it was Oliver North. At the end of Trump’s campaign, he has returned to the theme with which he began: the threat that immigrants pose to American society. In Minnesota, he told his supporters that “you’ve seen firsthand the problems caused with faulty refugee vetting, with very large numbers of Somali refugees coming into your state without your knowledge.” In Michigan, he blamed refugees for putting “your security at risk.” In Pennsylvania, he said, “You have people being brought into your community. Nobody knows who they are.” In Iowa, he described gruesome murders of Americans that were committed by immigrant killers. “The crime that’s been committed by these people is unbelievable.”

But the real news was about the electoral clout of “these people.” The background to those rallies was the accumulating evidence of a surge of Latino early voters, who may well change the course of this election. On Friday night, in Las Vegas, which has a large Latino population, the line to vote at a Cardenas supermarket was so long—at one point, more than a thousand people were waiting—that poll workers kept the site open until well after 10 P.M. The previous week, an A.P. photographer had captured a row of middle-aged women, most of them wearing casino housekeeper uniforms, standing in polling booths. The influential political analyst Jon Ralston wrote on Sunday that, in Las Vegas, Hillary Clinton’s early-voting lead may have put “a fitting final nail in Trump’s coffin.” In Florida, the line outside an Orlando library was ninety minutes long, and the political scientist Dan Smith noted the “explosive early voting turnout of Hispanics.” More than a third of those early voters did not vote in the last Presidential election. “The story of this election may be the mobilization of the Hispanic vote,” Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, and a vocal opponent of Trump, told the Times this weekend.

If Clinton does win tomorrow, the primary story will be the election of the first female President. A secondary story may be the confirmation of a liberal turn in national politics: since 1992, the Democrats will have won the popular vote in six of seven Presidential elections. But this weekend made clear that there will be a third story, about Latino voters, whom Trump called criminals throughout the election, and who played a crucial role in the Republican candidate’s comeuppance. The lines at the Las Vegas supermarket and the Orlando library are in part the consequence of Trump's narrow view of what makes a person American, and so they have an elevated meaning. For many Latino and immigrant voters, given everything that has come before, winning would be the ultimate declaration of belonging.

Previously, the story told about Latino voters was about their fear of Trump, and his threat of mass deportation. “Papi, can we stay?” a (fictional) little girl asks her father, in an ad that the filmmaker Joss Whedon made in support of Clinton. “I’m scared that my parents will get deported,” a (real) girl in a blue dress tells Clinton, in one of her campaign’s last official videos. But at early-voting locations in Florida and Nevada, Latino voters often sounded less defensive: they were confident that they had a better understanding than Trump of what it means to be an American. “He doesn’t have the values of our nation,” a woman named Rosa Agosto, who identified herself as Puerto Rican, told the Tampa Bay Times, in Kissimmee, Florida. “He’s not the kind of man who should be President,” a Puerto Rico­-born English teacher named Greta Gomez said. The tone could be cheeky: when the Times asked a maintenance worker named Oscar Diaz, in West Tampa, Florida, what brought him to the polls, he said, “Trump’s big mouth.”

The Democrats, and the Clintons in particular, have been chasing scenes like these for a long time. In 1972, Bill and Hillary Clinton, working for the Democratic candidate George McGovern, set up in the Rio Grande Valley, registering Latinos to vote. This year, Hillary Clinton had Astrid Silva, a twenty-eight-year-old undocumented immigrant and activist for immigrant rights, speak at the Democratic National Convention. It is difficult to imagine Silva on that stage five years ago, and impossible to see her there fifteen years ago. But in this election some of the old preferences of the immigrant electorate have weakened—there is little talk about the conservatism of many Cuban-Americans and Vietnamese-Americans—and have been replaced by a new set of questions, not about their relation to the old country but about their place in this one.

Throughout the election, Trump has wanted a fight over American identity, to make himself the candidate of those who remember George Patton and Douglas MacArthur and to make Clinton the candidate of an alarming other. He is getting that fight now. Over the weekend, Clinton campaigned with Khizr Khan, in New Hampshire. “Thankfully, Mr. Trump, this isn’t your America,” Khan said. For decades, the Clintons have presented themselves as the candidates of the future. But the race against Trump and the shape of Hillary Clinton’s coalition have made that position more meaningful than ever. This election may well be won on the idea that the history of the American people is not so easily distinguished from global history, and that American identity is fixed in a shared future rather than a shared past.