Meet Jim Marchant, Republican candidate from Nevada, who helped organize the “America First” slate of candidates whose primary objective was to tear down the democratic election system so that they would no longer be “victimized” by fraudulent voting. Marchant was defeated by Cisco Aguilar, the Democratic candidate for secretary of state in Nevada, on November 8. With Marchant’s loss, all but one of those “America First” candidates were defeated.
Marchant’s website spells out his convictions and his obsessions:
In 2020 Jim ran for Congress for Nevada’s Congressional District 4 and was a victim of election fraud. Jim was endorsed by President Donald J. Trump, Congressman Jim Jordan, Congressman Andy Biggs, Congressman Paul Gosar, and the House Freedom Caucus. In February of 2021, Jim announced his intentions to run for Secretary of State in Nevada. His number one priority will be to overhaul the fraudulent election system in Nevada.
Specifically, according to The New York Times, their plan was to take over the election apparatus in critical states before the 2024 presidential election. In short, they planned to highjack the 2024 election to make sure that the GOP candidate (presumably Donald Trump) would win.
Marchant lost in 2020, and so the system was “fraudulent”. That made him a “victim”. This is a narrative that has been threatening democracy in America for at least 5 years. The America First slate comprises more than a dozen candidates who falsely claim the 2020 election was stolen from Donald J. Trump. It grew out of meetings held by a conspiracy-mongering QAnon leader and a Nevada politician, and has quietly gained support from the biggest names in that group of crazies that includes Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder, and Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com executive who has financed public forums that promote the candidates and theories about election vulnerabilities.
The candidates’ main effort is “to fight for the future of democracy” by “reforming” what they call a broken voting system — and apparently by winning elections by pandering to the GOP fringe.
This midterm election was to bring the much-anticipated “Red Wave” that fortunately for America, never materialized. Indeed, instead of breaking the electoral system—as they intended to do–they broke the tradition that the party of the incumbent goes down in flames at the midterm elections. Following that long-established pattern, Republicans should have roundly defeated the Democratic runners, instead, they failed to gain control of the Senate, something they had been all but certain to achieve.
The losses of all but one of the America First candidates halted a plan by allies of former President Donald J. Trump that scared not just the voters, but even some Republicans. Maybe this wave of rejection signals an end of the crazies and the conspiracists.
