Graham Platner had a Nazi tattoo and a rape allegation. He was the Democratic Senate nominee in Maine until three weeks ago. His replacement, Troy Jackson, reportedly married his second cousin. This is considered an improvement.
This is the Democratic Party’s 2026 candidate class. And it gets considerably worse.
James Talarico is the Democrats’ Senate candidate in Texas — a state they haven’t won statewide since 1994, but they’re trying anyway. Talarico believes God is nonbinary, has an unusual public focus on transgender children, and has raised millions from Reid Hoffman — a Jeffrey Epstein associate who also funded E. Jean Carroll’s litigation against Trump. He is running for Senate in Texas. Good luck with that.
In Arizona’s 6th Congressional District, Democrat Joanna Mendoza had a 16-day marriage to a Syrian national. In California’s 22nd, Randy Villegas — who wants to abolish prisons — rehired a known pedophile when he served on a school board. In Colorado’s 8th, Manny Rutinel has a collection of social media posts he’s deleted and, more significantly, helped kill a bill that would have imposed mandatory prison sentences on convicted child sex predators.
In Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District, Democratic candidate Sarah Trone Garriot officiated a satanist wedding. In New Jersey’s 12th, Adam Hamawy — who actually won his primary — has documented ties to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and al-Qaeda-linked networks. In New Mexico’s 2nd, Gabe Vazquez staged a fake wedding.
And then there’s Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington, running for reelection, who reportedly beheaded a chicken in college. This is not, apparently, disqualifying for a congressional seat — though she did recently implode in an NPR interview when asked simple questions about her ties to socialist politics within her own party.
Here’s the broader pattern that Republicans need to hammer from now until November: this is not a collection of bad apples in an otherwise functional barrel. This is what the Democratic primary process now produces. When your activist base is dominated by DSA members and progressive ideologues who view normal electoral politics as insufficient to their revolutionary goals, the candidates who win your primaries look like this list. Not like Harry Truman. Not like John Kennedy. Like this.
The RNC’s Natalie Baldassarre said it plainly: “Democrats are openly embracing the freaky fringe of their party and showing voters just how detached they are from reality.”
She’s right. And every Republican running in a competitive district in 2026 should be forcing their Democratic opponent to answer a simple question: do you support or disavow your party’s nominees?
Because the list above is their party’s nominees. The American people deserve to know whether they endorse it.
Terrorist ties. Pedophile enablers. Satanist weddings. Fake marriages. A Nazi-tattooed rape accused as the top of the Senate ticket.
The Democratic Party cannot find normal people to run for office because normal people don’t want to run as Democrats anymore.
That’s the story of 2026. Make sure every voter knows it.
