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On Tuesday night, Minnesota Republicans sealed their fate as a pro-extremist party when they officially voted for bigoted podcaster Royce White as their nominee for one of Minnesota's Senate seats.
The win is a political comeback of sorts for White, who waged a failed GOP primary bid in 2022 in the race to represent Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District, a seat held by Rep. Ilhan Omar. But White’s win this year arguably makes a GOP loss in the Senate race more likely.
White defeated Joe Fraser, who was running as a more mainstream, normal-sounding Republican — who, Fraser argued, would give the party a chance in the general election against incumbent Sen. Amy Klobuchar.
White, on the other hand, is a former college basketball player who had a cup of coffee in the NBA before dropping out of the league over a conflict around his anxiety disorder. He’s since become an internet-based conspiracy theorist and the host of an aptly titled podcast, “Please, Call Me Crazy.” White (who is Black) is a mentee of far-right Trump adviser Steve Bannon and sees himself as a MAGA evangelist in Bannon’s hapless effort to lure Black men toward conservative Republicanism.
One of the ways White has sought to do that is through rank misogyny. I wrote earlier this year about how White went viral over comments he made in a resurfaced podcast interview with Bannon, in which White claimed women have become “too mouthy” these days. Politically speaking, White is a walking red flag who is likely to provide his opponent with what seems like a library’s worth of sound bites to work with in the coming months.
That includes his use of homophobic and misogynistic slurs to attack people online, his antisemitic rhetoric, his embrace of 9/11 conspiracy theories, and it's possible that his use of campaign funds at a Miami strip club in 2022 could come up.
All these things were widely known before Tuesday. But a plurality of GOP voters in Minnesota rejected Fraser's electability argument. Instead, they selected an outspoken devotee of Donald Trump’s hypermasculine cult of personality, spurning the moderate candidate who might have given them a puncher’s chance at winning a Senate seat this fall.