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A congressional candidate in Texas with “Nazi-ish” politics. A congressional candidate in Arizona who “stole valor” and then blamed his grandchildren. A demon-hunting gubernatorial candidate in Colorado who refuses to say precisely how many people he’s killed, and the congressional candidate dubbed the “goth groypette” rallying beside him. Another congressional candidate in Florida who called for nuking Gaza. A state senate candidate in Florida who marched with Nazis in Charlottesville. And the nominee for a North Carolina state senate seat who called into a local news station during an armed standoff with police.
TPM decided to put together a short list of some of this election year’s most extreme, toxic, bizarre, and scandal-plagued candidates. It can not be emphasized enough that this is not a comprehensive list — the disturbing and absurd stories of these midterms could fill a book.
It’s just a reminder of how unhinged American politics has become — and of the stories you maybe didn’t see on your timelines during an incessant, crowded news cycle.
Jace Yarbough
Before GOP-led redistricting last year, Texas’ 32nd Congressional District was reliably blue. Now, with redrawn boundaries stretching from Dallas to more conservative areas east, voters are poised to send a Republican to Washington who describes his own beliefs as “Nazi-ish.”
Jace Yarbough, a lawyer and Air Force reservist, won a crowded GOP primary in March after an endorsement from Trump, along with donations — the Guardian uncovered — from rich, far-right donors including billionaire Peter Thiel (currently touring the world lecturing about the “antichrist”) and Charles Haywood, the founder of a secretive, neo-fascist fraternal order who has expressed a desire to be a “warlord” at the head of an “armed patronage network” in “more-or-less open warfare with the federal government.”
At a candidate forum hosted by the far-right Dallas Express, held a month before the primary, Yarbough articulated a white nationalist worldview, arguing for overturning the Hart-Celler Act, the 1965 law that put an end to race-based immigration quotas, and lamenting the “hordes of Islamic immigrants coming and attempting to set up Sharia law here in the United States.” Then he struck a defiant tone, refusing to apologize for maybe being a little sympathetic to Nazism.
“The kind of good government that I want to offer, that you and I agree with, they call it bigoted and backward and oppressive and Nazi-ish,” he said, before adding: “I am past trying to placate that in any way, shape or form.”
Tom Smith
This Mr. Smith didn’t even want to go to Washington. The GOP nominee for Michigan’s competitive 8th district, including parts of Flint and Saginaw, had suspended his campaign in July, endorsing one of his opponents in a three-way primary. But when voters went to the ballot box, they declined to pick the Trump-endorsed candidate, Amir Hassan, voting overwhelmingly for Smith instead. (Local GOP leaders speculated MAGA voters passed over Hassan because of his Arabic name.)
Smith, a retired General Motors engineer, suddenly found himself running a closely-watched general election, with a series of bizarre, extreme social media posts he made falling under media scrutiny. In since-deleted posts from accounts belonging to his salsa company, JarHead Salsa, Smith shared memes that called for Dr. Anthony Fauci to be executed via the electric chair, and for the Dept. of Education to be abolished “to protect our children from evil,” suggesting kids were being indoctrinated into being queer, The Detroit News reported.
Smith attended the Jan. 6, 2021 rally that turned into the insurrection, TPM was first to reveal, but did not go inside the Capitol building. Posting from the JarHeadSalsa account, he responded to a tweet claiming the Jan. 6 insurrection wasn’t an insurrection at all, but “deep state set up” coordinated by the FBI.
“I agree,” he wrote.
Randy Fine
This midterm election cycle has been marked by GOP candidates embracing the most extreme, explicit, ugly anti-Muslim bigotry. (Mother Jones has a good, urgent piece about just how bad it’s gotten.) But even in a political party rife with such bigotry, one figure stands out for the intensity of his Islamophobia: Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.).
“We need more Islamophobia, not less,” the congressman wrote on X once. “Fear of islam is rational.”
Fine, who won a special election in Florida’s 6th Congressional District last year, is expected to win the solidly red swath of Florida’s Space Coast on Tuesday despite years of statements dehumanizing Muslims. The self-described “Hebrew Hammer” has called Muslim Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN) “Muslim terrorists.” Earlier this year on X, Fine wrote: “If they force us to make a choice, the decision between dogs and Muslims isn’t a difficult one for us.” And once, talking about “mainstream Muslims,” Fine asserted: “I don’t know how you make peace with those who seek your destruction, I think you destroy them first.”
His rhetoric about Palestinians is arguably genocidal. Fine has posted hashtags on X that include “BombsAway” and “StarveAway” when discussing Palestinians. Once, when an account on X sent him a photo of a dead Palestinian child, asking how he slept at night, Fine responded: “Quite well, actually! Thanks for the pic!”
Once, when asked about Gaza on Fox News, Fine stated: “We nuked the Japanese twice in order to get unconditional surrender. That needs to be the same here. There is something deeply, deeply wrong with this culture and it needs to be defeated.”
Asked on CNN to clarify if he was really calling to nuke Gaza, Fine said no — not because he had a problem with potentially killing millions of Palestinians — but because the radioactive “fallout would drift into Israel.”
David Flippo
We’ll let these paragraphs from a Washington Post investigation speak for themselves:
David Flippo, a Republican congressional candidate in Nevada, inflated his military record multiple times in recent years by falsely claiming he received a Bronze Star “for valor” during his two-decade Air Force career.
Flippo received a Bronze Star in 2004 for his service, but not the Bronze Star with valor, a much rarer distinction that recognizes heroism in direct combat with an enemy. Experts on military awards say such exaggerations are tantamount to lying. The Flippo campaign acknowledged the misrepresentations but downplayed them as “honest mistakes” by staff members.
Although initially blaming his campaign staff for the purported confusion over his service in Iraq, this excuse was hard to believe when Nevada News & Views later reported that Flippo had been spotted on the campaign trail — on multiple occasions, over the last three years — wearing a baseball cap with symbols indicating he’d won… a Bronze Star with valor.
Asked by Mother Jones about the hat, Flippo took the novel approach of … blaming his grandchildren, saying they’d affixed the two “V” symbol patches on his hat. “First the staff, now it’s the grandkids’ fault,” MJ reporter Noah Lanard observed recently on a podcast, adding: “kudos to his grandkids, because they’re pinned in a very orderly way and perfectly, so they did a great job with their decorations.”
Flippo is running in a reliably red district. But the “stolen valor” story — along with other assorted scandals — has pollsters eyeing the district for a potential Democratic upset.
Victor Marx
Victor Marx, the Republican nominee for governor of Colorado, has variously claimed to be the “world’s fastest gun disarmer,” a “7th degree black belt in Cajun Karate Keichu,” a “high-risk humanitarian” who has “rescued” 45,000 children from captivity and sex-trafficking, and a Christian preacher with the ability to cast out demons, a ritual he claims he can perform not only in person, but over the phone. He has, he once said, met Satan in person.
Disturbingly, Marx has also claimed to have grown up with an abusive stepfather who made him behead a cat when he was three years old and then, four years later in Mississippi, forced him to pull the trigger of a gun, killing a man. (Although Marx claimed to have later alerted authorities, the local sheriff’s office denied having reports of a murder around that time.)
Perhaps the most alarming moment of Marx’s campaign came during a rare, sit-down interview he granted to Kyle Clark, a news anchor in Denver. “Your claim that your abusive stepfather forced you to kill a man when you were seven years old — is that the only person you ever killed?”
The question was followed by an agonizingly long pause. “Well I would say, as a child, yes,” Marx eventually responded. “Without question. But I’ve been in other situations, possibly people or persons died as a result of me defending myself…”
“Do you think you killed people as an adult?”
“Does it matter?” Marx said.
Marx has since refused to say precisely how many people he has killed, although he once claimed — while working as a civilian — called in a military airstrike that killed 70 ISIS fighters.
Brandon Herrera
Brandon Herrera, the Republican nominee for the 23rd Congressional District in Texas, goes by the moniker “The AK Guy” on YouTube, where he’s a popular “gunfluencer” with millions of followers. Videos on his channel show him using a Nazi submachine gun he calls the “original ghetto blaster” and “Hitler’s street sweeper,” before he goose-steps to a song that was sung by German Nazis.
He is a Second Amendment fundamentalist, or a gun rights absolutist, once unleashing a torrent of vulgar language at Shannon Watts, founder of the gun control advocacy group Moms Demand Action. “Just because you let somebody creampie you doesn’t mean I have to give a shit about your political opinions,” he said to Watts in a video, adding: “The fact that you kept your cum trophy doesn’t make you any less wrong about the dumb shit that you say.”
“A guy like me could have never run had we not had a President Trump,” Herrera told TPM in March. “There’s a lot of things that he would say that a Republican candidate could not have said 10, 12, 15 years ago.”
“We don’t have to pretend to be something we’re not,” he added.
If elected, Herrera would be poised to represent a district in West Texas that abuts El Paso, where a white supremacist mass shooter killed 23 Hispanic people inside a Walmart with one of Herrera’s favorite guns, the AR-15, and Uvalde, Texas, where an 18-year-old former student walked into an elementary school and committed one of the worst school shootings in history, taking 77 minutes to execute 19 children and two teachers at close range.
Jonathan Miller
“The whole police department is chasing me with guns drawn. This should be fun,” read a post on X earlier this month from Jonathan Miller, the Libertarian candidate for a state Senate seat in North Carolina. “I’ve got six shots and the high ground. I hope they don’t find me, but if they do it’s going to be a hell of a show.”
Miller wasn’t just shitposting. That morning, police had performed a welfare check at his apartment complex in Cary, North Carolina, responding to some alarming posts Miller had made on X threatening self-harm. When the officer arrived, Miller ran into the woods, beginning an hours-long police chase. At various points Miller called into WRAL, the local NBC-affiliate news show, to give updates. “They have been chasing me since this morning. They’re not very good at it,” he said. “They really probably should get some more training on tracking somebody down.”
Miller, who will be on the ballot Tuesday, was eventually located by police and detained without incident. “He was in a dark place,” the local police chief told WRAL. “Felt like he was on his last leg.”
Kelley Dennison
Republican Kelley Dennison has very little chance of upsetting Rep. Joe Neguse, the Democratic incumbent, in Colorado’s 2nd Congressional District. The massage therapist and self described “goth baddie,” however, has already earned a dubious distinction, according to the Bulwark’s Will Sommer, becoming the “first groyperish candidate to win a federal nomination.”
“Groyper,” of course, refers to fans and supporters of white supremacist Nick Fuentes’ “America First” movement — which has been making inroads into GOP politics for years. Dennison has earned the moniker “goth groypette” for a series of online posts in which she seemed to embrace Fuentes’ movement. As Sommer describes:
Dennison has not formally identified as a groyper, and she didn’t respond to a request for comment. But her online campaign work leans heavily into groyper symbolism. In July, she reposted a reference to the “It’s okay to be white” meme on Facebook. The next month, she even posted a meme version of herself imagined as the groyper toad, along with a caption about being “America First”—a slogan Fuentes himself frequently uses.
The “goth groypette” has not campaigned that much. A photo on her campaign site purporting to show Dennison talking to supporters appears to be AI-generated. She has, however, nevertheless been embraced by GOP leaders in the state, appearing at least one real-life campaign event, rallying alongside another GOP candidate appearing on this list: demon-hunter Victor Marx.
Marshall Rawson
TPM readers are likely well-aware of Marshall Rawson, the Republican nominee for a seat in a Florida state House of Representatives. Last month we exposed parts of Rawson’s involvement with a white supremacist group called League of the South, including his attendance at the deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017.
We asked 28 GOP officials in the state if they denounced Rawson’s white supremacy — including his calls to execute gay people — but came up empty. Even after our reporting was featured this past weekend on John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight, nary a Republican figure has spoken out against his candidacy. Rawson, running in a deep red district, will likely be a legislator in Tallahassee next year.
