The polls are telling a clear story. Voters are deeply uncomfortable with what the Republican Party has become. And yet the party’s response is not to course-correct. It is to double down, lean in, and flood the ballot with the most extreme slate of candidates this country has seen in modern memory.
Donald Trump’s approval ratings are scraping new lows. The Iran war drags on with no end in sight. Gas prices keep climbing. Congressional Republicans spent their final weeks before recess fighting each other over a voter suppression bill that never even reached the Senate floor. The political headwinds are howling. So what does the GOP do? It tells candidates to embrace Trump harder. GOP campaign officials are explicitly urging every Republican, including self-styled moderates like Rep. Mike Lawler, to lean in rather than away from a president whose standing with the public is in freefall. Lawler welcomed Trump to his Hudson Valley district for a joint rally. Solidarity with power, not accountability to constituents, is the operating principle.
And then there are the candidates themselves. The 2026 midterms are not a normal election. They are a flowering of a rightward shift that has been accelerating for three decades, from Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America through the Tea Party wave to Trump’s capture of the party in 2016. What was once fringe is now the Republican mainstream.
In Texas, primary voters selected Ken Paxton to run for the U.S. Senate. Paxton was impeached by his own state’s ultra-conservative legislators for abusing his office to help his friends. His own staffers reported him to the FBI for funneling favors to a political donor. He admitted to violating securities laws. He architected the extreme abortion ban that eventually led to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. He sued to block a basic income pilot program for low-income residents in Harris County. He campaigned against John Cornyn by suggesting Cornyn had “helped radical Islamic Afghans invade Texas.” This is who Republican voters chose. This is who Trump endorsed.
Brandon Herrera, running in Texas’s 23rd District, built a YouTube channel fetishizing weapons, hosted Kyle Rittenhouse on his show, and recreated the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. for content. His answer to school shootings is firearm training for school staff. Trump backed him too.
In Nevada, the GOP nominated Marty O’Donnell, who says women having sex before marriage causes societal collapse and who hosted a neo-Nazi on his podcast. In Georgia, Senate candidate Mike Collins has a son-in-law with 1.5 million followers and a documented history of white nationalist, Holocaust-minimizing content. Collins himself has talked about shooting undocumented immigrants and suggested dropping a Venezuelan immigrant from an airplane. His former chiefs of staff participated in white supremacist group chats and mocked an alleged rape victim on campaign social media.
In Colorado, gubernatorial candidate Victor Marx claims to exorcise demons his dog sniffs out of strangers, says homosexuality is caused by the devil, and ran a campaign ad depicting his Jewish opponent with red horns. In Arizona, Andy Biggs, a former House Freedom Caucus chair, has attended rallies alongside the Proud Boys, appeared on a show hosted by someone who called Judaism a “death cult” and demanded the expulsion of Jews from the United States, and is a fervent 2020 election denier. He is currently trailing Governor Katie Hobbs by eight points.
The polls show voters rejecting this. But rejection at the ballot box is not enough. The structural conditions that produced this slate, a party apparatus purged of moderates, a primary system that rewards extremism, a billionaire-backed media ecosystem that normalizes fascism, remain intact regardless of who wins in November. Every single one of these candidates must be defeated. And then the systems that nominated them must be dismantled. That is the work. That is the call. There is no shortcut around it.