A version of the below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.
Before I get to the most extreme Republican candidate…
By now you’re probably sick of hearing about Graham Platner and the debacle in Maine. Last week, the allegation from a former girlfriend that he had once raped her—a charge he denied—ended the Senate campaign of this Marine vet and oysterman who had been embraced by some Democrats and progressives as the Great Blue-Collar Hope of the party. That credible accusation led to much debate over whether Platner’s advocates had been wrong to stick with him through earlier scandals about his Nazi tattoo, extramarital sexting, assorted online remarks, and allegations that he had mistreated girlfriends, with some folks suggesting Platner had been cut slack because he was a white guy. Three hundred members of the Democratic Socialists of America angrily urged DSA candidates to cut ties with Morris Katz, a key consultant to Platner’s campaign; New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is a DSA member who has a close relationship with Katz.
No one’s asking me for advice. But with so much at stake in the coming midterms, such post-Platner squabbling is not useful. Donald Trump and the GOP have been implementing authoritarian measures, and American democracy is at risk. Democrats looking to counter this threat need to succeed in November. Those elections should be their sole focus—be they DSAers or centrists. This truly is not the time for intraparty score-settling.
Okay, one more thing about the Platner disaster. I hate to come across as an institutionalist, particularly when our political institutions, including the Democratic Party, are frequently failing to serve the best values of the nation. But there’s often good reason for traditional practices.
Platner was a political novice. As has been widely noted, he was not thoroughly vetted. I’m not confident that a thorough investigation would have turned up what happened between him and an ex-girlfriend. Campaign vetting is hardly a magical operation that uncovers all. But had he run previously for lower offices, this and other past conduct might have become known.
Seeking political office is damn hard, and candidates must contend with many challenges—some real, some manufactured by opponents. It’s generally good to develop experience as a politician. There’s a reason why virtually all major league baseball players start in the minor leagues. That’s where they learn the ropes. It’s also where their potential can be scoped out and evaluated by coaches and fans.
Platner parachuted into politics at a high level. Very few people can do this. (You-know-who did so, and that’s been good for him and his cronies, but a disaster for the nation.) Pursuing a career in politics by moving up the ladder from one office to another is easily scorned. But it does repeatedly put candidates in front of the electorate and in a position to be poked, probed, and examined. Platner skipped all that. That was to his detriment and that of Maine voters.
To be sure, there are people who can traipse into politics from other fields. And given how broken American politics have become, it’s easy to be cynical about conventional candidates and hopeful about fresh-faced outsiders. But perhaps the lesson here is that experience and battle-testing ought not to be readily dismissed by those who justifiably yearn for political change.
Now on to another disastrous but successful newbie politician who is perhaps the most extreme GOP candidate in this year’s elections: Victor Marx, who last week won the Republican gubernatorial primary in Colorado in a highly competitive contest.
Marx, a Christian fundamentalist, is a Marine vet who once worked as an assistant to James Dobson at Focus on the Family, a leading religious-right outfit. Dobson, who died last year, was one of the nation’s most prominent opponents of LGBTQ rights and marriage equality. He called for women to be subservient to men in the home. He said that mass school shootings were God’s vengeance for Americans’ acceptance of abortion and homosexuality. You know, the whole megillah.
Marx founded a nonprofit ministry called All Things Possible that says it mounts operations in “high-risk” areas, such as war-torn nations, to rescue women and children. His campaign website claimed that his group had rescued more than 45,000 women, but that assertion proved not to be true and was removed. Marx blamed a campaign consultant for the supposed error.
When Colorado reporter Kyle Clark in May pressed Marx on how many rescues his ministry had accomplished, Marx wouldn’t share an estimate. He was also shifty when Clark asked him for details on the 130 missions he had previously said his group had run to rescue women and children, and he provided no specifics on these operations. He also wouldn’t share any information to back up a previous claim that on one of his missions he called in an airstrike on ISIS.
It was hard to watch Clark’s interview with Marx and not conclude there has been a fair bit of BSing on Marx’s part.
And there are plenty of other suspicious elements within his biography. Marx says that when he was three years old, his stepfather forced him to behead a cat and wear the cat’s carcass on his head. He also says that when he was seven, his stepfather made him shoot and kill a man. Not surprisingly, there’s no proof of these awful stories.
Beyond pitching (tall?) tales about his past, Marx promotes the concept of spiritual warfare, which holds that Satan is rather busy in the real world and responsible for the evils perceived by Christian fundamentalists, such as abortion and homosexuality. That means that anyone supporting reproductive rights or LGBTQ rights is in the clutches of the devil and that only believers in Jesus Christ (as Marx defines that belief) are on the right side. He produced a movie that declares “spiritual warfare is real.” Marx has repeatedly criticized Christian pastors across the country for being “cowardly.” Appearing on Charlie Kirk’s podcast in 2022, he complained that “in America, the Christian faith has been hijacked by…woke…or passive…or liberal” people.
There’s more: Marx claims that demonic possession is real and that he has been able to remove demons from the possessed through prayer. In a 2022 talk, he described how he had rescued a demon-possessed girl incarcerated in a juvenile prison. He purportedly did so after meeting with her in the prison—encountering the demon who spoke through her and claimed to be Satan—and later simply saying a short prayer for her. He didn’t explain why it was essentially so easy to beat back this Satan-wannabe demon.
Marx asserts that demonic possession can be caused by pornography or unmarried couples living together. In a 2023 Turning Point USA podcast, he noted that he “hunts demons” and that his dog once identified a supernatural presence in a couple at a pool, and he subsequently freed the woman from “five demons that had been assigned to her.” He has called himself—jokingly, he says—a “reluctant exorcist.”
During the primary campaign, Marx, who had not previously run for any office, deliberately avoided offering specifics on policy matters, noting he’d rather have voters adjust to his unorthodox background. He was endorsed by Rep. Lauren Boebert and Ted Nugent. He won the primary with 39 percent, besting state Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer by 2,500 votes. Coming in third was Scott Bottoms, a state representative. Throughout the campaign, establishment Republicans criticized Marx, and some questioned whether he was a con man.
A majority of Colorado Republicans did not back Marx. But this race shows that as Trump’s approval ratings plummet, the GOP remains dominated by extremism and Christian fundamentalism. Marx is not the Republicans’ Platner. But he’s an inexperienced candidate with a sketchy past who believes most of the people he seeks to lead are being controlled by Lucifer. His primary victory is a reminder that Trump is far from the only dangerous influence within the GOP.