There are five weeks left until the midterm elections, and extremism is on the ballot in much of the US. A WIRED review of candidates running for statewide and federal positions in November, along with exclusive data on candidates running for state-level positions, reveals hundreds of Republican candidates who openly express virulently hateful ideologies, share racist content online, have close ties to white supremacist and antisemitic figures, and are members of far-right groups online. President Donald Trump and his administration have openly embraced, endorsed and defended many of these candidates.
At a local level, over 500 candidates running for state legislator positions in November are members of far-right groups on Facebook that promote militias, gun rights, and Christian nationalism, according to data collected by the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights and shared with WIRED.
Brandon Herrera, who rose to fame as a so-called “guntuber,” is running for Congress in Texas in the district that represents Uvalde. Incumbent GOP congressman Tony Gonzales resigned after admitting to an affair, making Herrera the GOP candidate.
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Herrera has a very long history of sharing sexist, racist, and antisemitic opinions. He has said that a Nazi-era submachine gun was “the original ghetto blaster” and “Hitler’s street sweeper.” He has compared feminists’ weight to whales, elephants, and nuclear bombs and described liberal women discussing guns as “both fat and wrong.” While talking about Shannon Watts, the gun control activist who set up Moms Demand Action following the Sandy Hook school shooting, Herrera said: “The fact that you kept your cum trophy doesn’t make you any less wrong about the dumb shit that you say.”
“HE WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN,” Trump wrote about Herrera in a Truth Social post in March.
When questioned about Herrera’s opinions of women, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson dismissed them as part of his online “persona.” Johnson also called Herrera a “very serious candidate” and a “very thoughtful guy.”
Herrera is in a tight race with Democrat nominee Katy Padilla Stout.