// WIRED US/UK — MODA & SOCIETÀ
These Extremists Are Running for Election in November
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.
While many extremist candidates—such as groyper James Fishback and antisemitic influencer Dan Bilzerian— didn’t make it through GOP primaries, many made it to the general election, and a number of them are expected to win.
“The candidates are taking a page out of the Trump administration’s playbook,” Luke Baumgartner, a former research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, tells WIRED. Baumgartner claims that many of the candidates running in November have been inspired by those in the White House. “In essence, the executive branch has handed them a permission slip to say and do what would have been unthinkable during the George W. Bush, McCain, or [Mitt] Romney eras of the GOP,” he says.
Extremist rhetoric has led to real world political threats. In 2025, terrorism and targeted violence incidents rose 19 percent compared to 2024, according to researchers at the University of Maryland; the US Capitol Police reported an increase in “threat assessment cases” against members of Congress for the third year in a row, with a 58 percent increase from 2024; and the US Marshals Service documented threats against almost 400 judges, a roughly 5 percent increase from the previous year.
Here are five races involving candidates who have shared extremist ideologies or have close ties to extremist figures, that WIRED is watching ahead of the November midterms.
Bo French, the GOP candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner, is so extreme that Republican strategist Karl Rove has said he would vote for a Democrat rather than supporting a “bigot.”
Earlier this month, French posted racist comments about students celebrating at a University of Texas at Austin football game. “Like bodycam footage exposed criminals, social media is exposing how many Americans have been displaced by foreigners,” French wrote alongside a picture of students of South Asian descent celebrating a victory over Ohio State. “It’s everywhere and far worse than any of us could imagine.” (Former Border Patrol leader Greg Bovino wrote in reply, “Mass deportations will solve it in very short order.”)
While many Republicans, including senator John Cornyn from Texas, criticized French for his post and called on him to take it down, French instead doubled down, telling a conservative radio host that while he didn’t “have anything against the people specifically in that picture,” he wanted to “prioritize Americans.”
This wasn’t the first controversy for the candidate: French has previously called for the removal of 100 million people from America, including US citizens, and repeatedly used homophobic slurs.