Republicans are more and more fully the party of insurrection and efforts to undermine faith in democracy. A scan of their would-be members of Congress across the country finds candidate after candidate who was there in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, protesting the certification of President Joe Biden’s election—but wants us to believe they left rather than joining the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol.
That’s true in Iowa, where Gary Leffler, one of the Republicans in the primary to challenge Democratic Rep. Cindy Axne, insists he didn’t go into the Capitol. It’s true in Ohio, where J.R. Majewski won a House primary this week after having raised $20,000 to bring dozens of people along with him to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, but—you’ve got it—claims he didn’t go inside. Annie Black, a member of the state Assembly and a congressional candidate in Nevada, tells the same story. Truly, having been there on Jan. 6 but not entered the Capitol is the “but I didn’t inhale” of 2022.
RELATED STORY: QAnon’s takeover of GOP nearly complete with 72 candidates ready to make ‘pedophilia’ claims
But while not every Republican running for Congress traveled to Washington, D.C., to rally against the peaceful transition of power on Jan. 6, downplaying the seriousness of what happened that day, or even actively supporting the mob that did it, is extremely common.
Co-founder of Sister District Gaby Goldstein joins The Downballot to discuss what Democrats in the states are doing to protect abortion rights
Leffler, for instance, is one of three people in his primary, which also includes state Sen. Zach Nunn and businesswoman Nicole Hasso. A Leffler loss, though, doesn’t mean a candidate who’s ready to condemn the Capitol insurrection. At a forum last week, The Daily Beast reports, Nunn criticized the criminal prosecutions of insurrectionists and said, “We have a Nancy Pelosi committee determined to find someone that they can hang a noose around.”
A noose, he says, in defense of the people who brought an actual noose to the U.S. Capitol and roamed the halls chanting “Hang Mike Pence.” This is a sitting state senator running for Congress in a district currently held by a Democrat.
Black, in Nevada, is likewise a state lawmaker, and her Republican primary opponent has embraced conspiracy theories about the 2020 elections, claiming there had been “vote switching on live TV.”
In New Hampshire’s 1st District, Republican primary voters can choose between a candidate who’s said Trump won in 2020, a candidate who wants election audits in every state, a candidate who wants new voter fraud laws even as he himself voted in two states in the 2016 primary season, and a candidate who has shown herself to be the moderate of the bunch by just talking about “irregularities.”
This is how pervasive conspiracy theories, denials that Donald Trump lost, efforts to rig the next election, and support for the Jan. 6 insurrectionists are in the Republican Party. They’re showing up in significant ways even in the primaries that should matter most to top Republicans: the ones in swing districts. Even as a recent poll shows just a small minority of Republicans approving of the actions of the “Trump supporters who broke into the Capitol,” at the candidate level, this is a party taken over by Trump’s sore-loserdom and his determination to overturn the election he lost and rewrite the rules so it can’t happen again. And while that may cost Republicans some districts in the November elections, if they nominate candidates who are too extreme, it also likely means that Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn and Paul Gosar and Lauren Boebert will be getting way too much company in the House next year.
RELATED STORIES:
Lawyers in Marjorie Taylor Greene reelection suit file motion to add 'Marshall law' text as evidence
Kevin McCarthy's failure to act on Gosar and Greene's white nationalist flirtation says it all
Biden, Democrats mull running against the fascists by defining them as fascists. Yes, please
Longtime Michigan Republican official resigns, saying GOP only loyal to ‘deranged narcissist’ Trump