If 1994 brought the Republican Revolution and 2010 delivered the Tea Party to D.C., the 2022 election may go down as the Wackadoodle Wave.Ĭandidates on the ballot who have a decent chance at winning include Big Lie adherents a man widely suspected of being the author behind Q, as in QAnon a former football star with a history of violence, abusive relationships, and dubious business ventures and a once-respected doctor who has come to peddle quack cures. Because the electoral environment favors GOP candidates, a crop of people like Van Orden is likely to be swept into office this year, with unpredictable and unsettling results. Driven by Trump and particularly by the prevalence of false claims about fraud in the 2020 election, the Republican Party is nominating more extreme candidates than ever for positions up and down the ballot. Greene may have plenty of other company come January 2023. Graham: Marjorie Taylor Green is just a symptom of what ails the GOP
Kind is retiring, Trump won the district in 2020, and both the Cook Political Report and Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball rate the district as leaning Republican in 2022.ĭavid A. If he wins the nomination, he’d be favored to win the seat. Van Orden is running for Congress again, and he is leading the Republican field, with the aid of a Donald Trump endorsement. And come January, he just might join her in the House. In short, Van Orden is an extreme, erratic politician in the mold of Marjorie Taylor Greene, the infamous U.S. He has criticized COVID-19 containment strategies, saying that contact tracing is the same as “what the KGB used to do in the Soviet Union and the Stasi used to do in East Germany.” (Van Orden’s campaign did not respond to an interview request.) (He did not dispute her account.) His commitment to social conservatism only extends so far, though: In a memoir of his military service, he jocularly described tricking two unsuspecting women into looking at a comrade’s swollen genitalia. Last year he entered a library in the town of Prairie du Chien and harangued a 17-year-old library staffer over a gay-pride display, leaving her feeling threatened. His views on voter fraud are not the only strange things about Van Orden.
He also spent campaign money while in Washington, an apparent violation of federal election law. When The Daily Beast uncovered photos showing that wasn’t true, Van Orden said the report was “ inaccurate,” but wouldn’t say why. Two months later, the former Navy SEAL was in Washington, D.C., on January 6, “to stand for the integrity of our electoral system.” He later wrote that he was “disturbed” by the violence that day, and never entered the U.S.
In November 2020, the Republican Derrick Van Orden narrowly lost his attempt to unseat Representative Ron Kind in Wisconsin’s Third District, falling just 10,000 votes behind the veteran Democrat out of nearly 400,000 cast.īut Van Orden insisted that voter fraud had tainted the election results.