Democrats should not allow extremist MAGA candidates to ‘rebrand’ themselves going into November

Boosted by endorsements from former President Trump, MAGA Republicans won many primaries in the spring and summer. For the general election, some of them have doubled down on their extremist pronouncements. Some have tried to walk them back and conceal evidence they ever made them. Most are doing all of the above.

Extremists and hypocrites, these candidates have handed Democrats plenty of material for a compelling campaign narrative that can energize their party’s base, while attracting independents and moderate Republicans.

To date, the MAGA gifts keep on giving:

Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, continues to insist that the 2020 presidential election was “corrupt and stolen.” Lake suggested the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects owners of rocket launchers. She has told women, “God did not create us to be equal to men.” She declared that the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago demonstrated that “our government is rotten to the core.”

That said, although she supported the Texas law that bans all abortions except those that save the life of the mother before she was nominated, Lake has now endorsed the current Arizona law allowing abortions for the first 15 weeks of a pregnancy, which she says she “didn’t know was on the books.”

Ahead of the Arizona primary for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate, Blake Masters’ campaign website asserted, “if we had a free and fair election, President Trump would be sitting in the Oval Office today.” These days, the website says only, “We need to get serious about election integrity.”

In the spring, Masters supported a constitutional amendment that affirms “unborn babies are human beings that may not be killed.” These days, references to a “federal personhood law” have been scrubbed from his website, which now indicates that that he favors programs “that make it easier for pregnant women to support a family and decide to choose life.”

An extremist even among extremists, Doug Mastriano, the Republican candidate for governor of Pennsylvania, remains a fervent election denier. He also believes the separation of church and state is a myth; same sex marriage should “absolutely not” be legal; abortion should be banned from conception, with no exceptions; mask mandates are “child abuse” and that the Islamic faith is not compatible with the U.S. Constitution. In April 2022, Mastriano attended a convention hosted by two QAnon activists, which began with a video claiming that George H.W. Bush and Angela Merkel were part of a “Nazi succession,” controlled by a satanic cult engaged in “ritual child sacrifice.” Until recently, he appeared frequently on Gab, a white nationalist platform that has been condemned as a “cesspool of bigotry and antisemitism.”

Mastriano’s campaign also paid “consulting” fees to Gab. Its founder and CEO, Andrew Torba, boasted that neither he nor Mastriano conduct interviews with reporters from news outlets that are not Christian. “This is an explicitly Christian movement because this is an explicitly Christian country,” Torba asserted. In a video, Torba said, “We’re not bending to the knee of the 2 percent anymore,” an apparent reference to Jews. “We’re taking back our country. We’re taking back our government. So, deal with it.” Mastriano publicly praised Torba for “giving us a platform for free speech… Thank God for what you’ve done.”

In response to the ensuing firestorm, Mastriano released a statement indicating that he rejects anti-Semitism “in any form” and that Torba “doesn’t speak for me or my campaign.” He did not repudiate Torba or Gab. Instead, Mastriano blamed the controversy on the media and Democrats.

Mastriano’s deletions — more than a dozen Facebook videos and 50 tweets with QAnon hashtags he has shared — have not kept up with his extremist pronouncements. But since the primary, he seldom mentions abortion.

During Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate primary, Donald Trump was ubiquitous in the ads and Twitter account of Dr. Mehmet Oz. Since Oz has become the Republican nominee, he rarely mentions Trump. “He has removed Trump’s endorsement from his site,” a student at Bloomsburg University, who attended the former president’s rally in Wilkes Barre, told a reporter. “So, I’m iffy on him.”

In Georgia, Herschel Walker has a different problem. Walker’s uninformed and incoherent comments about major political issues cast doubt on his qualifications to represent Georgia in the U.S. Senate. Following the mass shooting in a public school in Uvalde, Texas, Walker advocated “a department that can look at young men that’s looking at women that’s looking at social media.” He declared that the climate change provisions of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act don’t help Americans because “a lot of money is going to trees, and we have enough trees.”

However, Walker has also practiced a political version of the hidden ball trick. He deleted from his website false claims that he graduated from the University of Georgia. Before the primary, Walker demanded that “Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin vote again” for president and claimed the Jan. 6 rioters were actors. After he was nominated, Walker was asked if he believed the 2020 presidential election was stolen. “I don’t know whether President Trump said that,” he replied. “He never said that to me.” When the Fox News reporter indicated that Trump “says it over and over,” Walker shot back, “No, no, no, no. I’ve never heard President Trump ever say that … I think something happened. I don’t know what it was — but something happened because people are angry.”

This survey by no means exhausts the list of MAGA extremists who now are scrambling to convince voters they are in the political mainstream.

In March, Scott Jensen, Minnesota’s Republican gubernatorial nominee, said he did not support exceptions for rape and incest in anti-abortion laws. He has now reversed himself, explaining that his previous comments were “clumsy.” And in an ad that appeared last week, Jensen holds a baby and says: “abortion is a protected, constitutional right, and no governor can change that, and I’m not running to do that.”

Dan Cox, Maryland’s GOP gubernatorial candidate, called on Trump in late 2020 to “seize federal voting machines [there are no “federal” voting machines] in states where fraud was overwhelmingly rampant.” He believes the search of Mar-a-Lago was “nothing short of communist Stasi police state tactics.” If elected, Cox promises to use the Maryland State Police and National Guard to “stand against all rogue actions of this out of control and tyrannical Biden administration.” Characterized as a “QAnon whackjob” by Larry Hogan, Maryland’s popular Republican governor, Cox has deleted more than 1,000 posts from his social media accounts.

Although with these extremist Republican candidates, substantive legislative accomplishments during the summer, and the Supreme Court decision overthrowing Roe v. Wade have improved Democrats’ prospects in November, they remain underdogs. The party that controls the White House rarely does well in midterm elections, and a majority of Americans do not approve of Biden’s performance in office and are deeply concerned about inflation and a potential recession. The outcome of races in battleground states will depend on turnout.

With the intensification of threats to our democracy, legitimized by the former president and some Republican politicians, a lot is at stake.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. He is the co-author (with Stuart Blumin) of “Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century.”