It is almost certain that, come next year, there will be a Republican member of Congress who subscribes to the QAnon conspiracy theory.
On Tuesday, Marjorie Taylor Greene defeated neurosurgeon John Cowan in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District primary runoff. It’s an R+27 district, according to the Cook Political Report, so Democrat Kevin Van Ausdal has almost no shot at winning the general election.
For the Republican Party, it’s an embarrassment to have a conspiracy theorist in Congress. It hurts the party’s reputation. It gives people another chance to delegitimize the GOP, which doesn’t help when there are still liberals who think both the 2000 and 2016 presidential elections were rigged.
Many people on the Left want to expand voting, whether it’s letting 16-year-olds vote, universal mail-in ballots, or even compulsory voting (as one Democrat proposed in the Massachusetts legislature). However, Greene’s victory and other similar cases are a solid case for less voting — at least for party nominations. Citizens who can identify themselves deserve to vote without having to wait six hours, but perhaps parties should have more oversight as to who they nominate.
This is not to say the party establishments should just go ahead and rig the process. In Virginia, the 5th Congressional District Republican Committee ousted incumbent Rep. Denver Riggleman and replaced him with Bob Good, a member of the Campbell County Board of Supervisors, without letting constituents vote. The party wasn’t happy with Riggleman for officiating a same-sex wedding. Regardless of what one’s stance on same-sex marriage is, there’s no reason why voters shouldn’t have been able to express whether or not they approved of Riggleman.
Maybe the voters should have 50% of the say like they do in NBA All-Star Game voting. Then, state and county parties could divide up the rest of the influence. And in dire circumstances, parties should be able to take a name off a ballot if they feel more comfortable not running any candidate.
There have been instances where horrible candidates made it onto general election ballots. Neo-Nazi Arthur Jones was a Republican candidate for Congress in Illinois in 2018, and the GOP couldn’t remove him from the ballot. (Jones lost the general election in a dark-blue district by almost 50 percentage points.) The same thing happened in 1990 and 1991, when former KKK leader David Duke ran for U.S. Senate and governor in Louisiana. (He lost both elections, by 10 and 22 percentage points, respectively.)
In 2020, there are still candidates that parties should want to avoid. The Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Oregon, Jo Rae Perkins, is a QAnon supporter. Perkins got 49.2% of the vote in the Republican primary back in May — perhaps the state party should have done more to back Paul Romero, who got 30.4% of the vote.
In Georgia, the state GOP could have used their influence in the primary to get the aforementioned Cowan on the ballot. It’s not like the pro-Trump, pro-gun, pro-life conservative is a bad fit to represent Georgia’s 14th District, even if his platform is a bit simplistic.
And in Massachusetts, it’d be great if the Massachusetts GOP had some sway in the Sept. 1 primary to put a normal Republican like Kevin O’Connor on the November ballot rather than Shiva Ayyadurai, who has boosted conspiracy theories, appeared on live streams and videos with white nationalists and Holocaust deniers, and hawks groyper pins.
Some might say it screws with the democratic process and gives the establishment too much power. However, there’s no perfect system, so every party should have a catastrophic insurance package that prevents loose cannons from doing serious harm to them.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a freelance writer who has been published with USA Today, the Boston Globe, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Federalist, and a number of other media outlets.
