Even as Trump Flounders in the Polls, GOP Candidates Keep Running Further Right

As the midterm elections near, a slew of extremist candidates — selected by GOP primary voters at Donald Trump’s urging over the past few months to represent their party in the general election — are aiming to woo the public in marquis races around the country. Should they get elected, they will push the U.S. political system even further to the right, mainstreaming views that until recently would have been considered far outside of the boundaries of the acceptable.

For 30 years, I have followed the rightward drift of the GOP. Seemingly, each election cycle since the 1994 midterms that catapulted Newt Gingrich into control of the House of Representatives has resulted in a more extreme iteration of hard-right politics. Gingrich’s “Contract with America” ushered in sweeping cuts to the social safety net. Nine years later, Tom “The Hammer” DeLay became House majority leader on a platform even further to the right of anything Gingrich dared to propose. When he wasn’t pushing his authoritarian vision for the U.S., DeLay spent his time in leadership embroiled in increasingly bitter legal disputes, and narrowly avoided prison after being indicted on money laundering charges. In 2010, the Tea Party election swept out much of what remained of the GOP old guard in Congress and saw the party commit itself to even harsher anti-safety net, anti-immigration, and anti-health care coverage policies. In 2016, Trump captured the party and the MAGA movement began its purge of moderate Republicans they derided as being Republican In Name Only (RINOs). In the years following, relatively centrist figures such as Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake were drummed out of office, and both the GOP caucus in the Senate and the House of Representatives increasingly became redoubts for Trumpists, their members foot soldiers in what was increasingly a party based around a cult of personality.

Since Trump’s reelection, the Republican Party has increasingly opened its arms to overtly white nationalist and conspiracist candidates; to candidates who have established a working rapport with neo-fascist groups such as the Proud Boys and the Patriot Front; and, of course, to people willing to ignore Trump’s corruption. The 2026 elections represent a flowering of this Trump-inspired rightward shift.

For months now, I have watched the political fortunes of many extremist candidates, endorsed by Trump over more moderate rivals, rise. Here are a few who particularly stand out.

In Texas, at Trump’s urging, primary voters selected the corrupt state Attorney General Ken Paxton — dogged by scandals for 20 years in public life, impeached by his own state’s ultra-conservative GOP state legislators for abusing his office to help his friends, and subsequently acquitted by the state Senate — to run for the U.S. Senate seat in place of incumbent John Cornyn. This, despite the fact that his own staffers apparently reported him to the FBI for funneling favors to a political donor and despite the fact that a little over a decade ago he admitted to violating securities laws.

In addition to being comprehensively ethically challenged, Paxton has also pushed an extraordinary array of far right policies: He was the architect of the extreme (and at the time unconstitutional) abortion ban that triggered the lawsuits which eventually led to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade; he campaigned against GOP Senator Cornyn in part by suggesting that Cornyn had “helped radical Islamic Afghans invade Texas”; as attorney general, he approved undercover investigations broadly targeting left-leaning groups in a move that echoes the Trump administration’s own crackdown; he sued to block Harris County’s widely lauded pilot program that guaranteed a basic income to some low-income residents. The list goes on. In fact, take pretty much any hard-right position in the U.S. today, and there’s a good chance Paxton has his fingerprints on it.

The Senate hopeful isn’t the only extremist his party has nominated this election cycle. There is, for example, Brandon Herrera, running in Texas’s 23^rd congressional district. Herrera’s qualification for public office seems to rest mainly on his fetishization of guns; he hosts a YouTube channel in which he shows off his knowledge of, and testing of, a range of weapons; he has hosted Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot two protesters dead during the George Floyd protests of 2020; and he has apparently recreated the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on his show. It goes without saying that Herrera — who opposes any and all gun control legislation, and whose solution to school shootings is to fund “firearm training” for school staff — has been backed by Trump.

Texas is not alone in the GOP’s lurch rightward. In Nevada, the party has fielded television show and video game soundtrack composer Marty O’Donnell as its candidate in the 3^rd congressional district. O’Donnell says that when women have sex before marriage, society collapses. He has also hosted at least one neo-Nazi on his podcast.

In Georgia, Senate candidate Mike Collins has struggled to distance himself from his son-in-law, David Alan Scheer, after recent revelations that Scheer, who has more than 1.5 million online followers, has a long history as a white nationalist, Holocaust-minimizing social media influencer. Collins’s denials that Scheer is close to his campaign would, perhaps, hold more water had he not already been dogged by numerous other claims of extremism — had he himself, for example, not made fiercely inflammatory comments about shooting undocumented immigrants, and, in one case, suggested a Venezuelan immigrant should be dropped out of an airplane. Collins’s former chief of staff is reported to have taken part in white supremacist group chats, and another ex-chief of staff used Collins’s campaign social media accounts to mock an alleged rape victim.

Meanwhile, the GOP gubernatorial candidate in Colorado, Victor Marx, claims to exorcise demons (sniffed out by his dog) from strangers; has stated — without providing any evidence — that when he was 7 years old, his stepfather made him kill a man; and argues that homosexuality is caused by the devil. He has, apparently, a particular thing for devil imagery: In early August, Marx’s campaign ran an ad against his Democratic opponent, who is Jewish, depicting him with red horns, thus playing into one of the oldest of antisemitic stereotypes. Mother Jones has also reported that he believes that unmarried couples living together leave themselves open to demonic possession.

Finally, no piece on extremist GOP candidates would be complete without a nod to Arizona congressman and gubernatorial hopeful Andy Biggs. For years now, Biggs has staked out a position on the far right fringes of the MAGA movement. He chaired the House Freedom Caucus from 2019 through 2022 and since then has continued to attach himself to evermore extremist positions.

Biggs has numerous ties to white nationalist groups, and has been a guest on internet personality Stew Peters’s show, despite Peters having labeled Judaism a “death cult” and having called for the expulsion of Jews from the United States. The Southern Poverty Law Center has documented instances in which Biggs has attended far right rallies and conferences that were also attended by groups such as the Proud Boys. He also opposes pretty much all foreign aid spending and is a fervent 2020 election denier.

None of this should pass for normal. That such extreme figures are being nominated by primary voters for top state and federal political offices speaks volumes to the trends within today’s Republican Party. This November, we will see how palatable such candidates are to the broader electorate.

So far, the polls suggest that voters are deeply uncomfortable with such candidates: Biggs is trailing incumbent Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs by 8 percent; the political forecasting site Pollsmax puts the odds of Marx winning the Colorado governor’s race at less than 5 percent; and in Georgia, Collins is trailing incumbent Sen. Jon Ossoff in every recent poll. Even in deep red Texas, Paxton is struggling to gain traction. Evermore extreme MAGA candidates may delight Trump’s shrinking base, but there’s scant evidence that the majority of voters are buying what these candidates are selling in this electoral cycle.