The 10 Worst Midterm Candidates Running for Congress 

Four years ago, the Washington Monthly dove into the ample dumpster of dubious candidates seeking public office and selected the worst ten. Among these were Kari Lake, the GOP gubernatorial nominee in Arizona so devoted to Donald Trump that she not only repeated his lies about the 2020 presidential election but bragged of taking hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin to ward off COVID-19. The Monthly also included that state’s Republican Senate nominee, Blake Masters, who praised the Unabomber as an “underrated subversive thinker.”

This year, the field of hucksters and prevaricators, haters and boneheads, is even deeper, and the weirdness extends well beyond races for Congress. Consider four of the contenders for powerful state and local offices.

Michael Caruso, appointed Palm Beach County clerk of court by Governor Ron DeSantis, refuses to quit his reelection bid even after DeSantis suspended him following his arrest on five felony charges involving the alleged sexual abuse of a young relative. In Texas, Railroad Commission nominee Bo French wants to remove 100 million people from the country, has urged conservatives to embrace “Islamophobia,” and infamously used a photo of South Asian Longhorns fans as evidence that Americans are being “displaced by foreigners”—all while retaining the support of Governor Greg Abbott and the state oil-and-gas lobby. In Colorado, Republican gubernatorial nominee Victor Marx, a Marine veteran and likely fabulist, says his abusive stepfather forced him to behead a dead cat during a voodoo ritual when he was three. Four years later, Marx claims, his stepfather took him to rural Mississippi and forced him to participate in the shooting of a man, though Marx says his stepfather pulled the trigger. (Local authorities have found no record of a matching homicide.) Marx has also claimed to cast demons out of people, even over the phone, and once said he called in a U.S. airstrike that killed 70 ISIS fighters. (He later backed away from the airstrike claim.) Asked by a Denver television reporter how many people he had killed as an adult, Marx replied, “Does it matter?”

To keep this list manageable, we limited our ten worst to candidates for the U.S. House and Senate. Even then, paring the field down to ten wasn’t easy.

MAX MILLER Republican—Ohio 7th Congressional District

Most politicians under investigation insist the inquiry is a witch hunt. Max Miller took the unusual step of requesting an ethics investigation into himself. Miller’s ex-wife, Emily Moreno—the daughter of Bernie Moreno, the U.S. Senator from Ohio—has accused her ex-husband in court filings of physical abuse, including holding a gun to her head and throwing her against a wall. She has alleged that he injured their two-year-old daughter, who suffered a broken collarbone. Miller denies abusing either of them; police and child-welfare investigators were unable to determine who caused the child’s injury, and prosecutors brought no charges. The House Ethics Committee is nevertheless reviewing allegations of domestic violence, abuse, and illegal drug use.

Miller attempted to clear his name publicly by releasing hundreds of pages of records online—only for his ex-wife to sue after an unredacted nude photograph of their toddler was allegedly included in the files. His attorney acknowledged that sensitive images had been posted by mistake. Many GOP officials called for Miller to step aside, including his former father-in-law. But he refused, and so now national Republicans are spending heavily to save his seat in a district that supported Trump in 2024 by 11 percentage points. Cook, Inside Elections, and Sabato’s Crystal Ball all rate Miller’s race a toss-up.

KEN PAXTON Republican—U.S. Senate, Texas

Ken Paxton has accumulated so many scandals that it’s hard to decide which ones fit in a paragraph. Shortly after becoming Texas attorney general in 2015, he was indicted on securities-fraud charges; the case ended nine years later under an agreement requiring restitution, community service, and legal-ethics courses but no guilty plea. In 2023, the Republican-controlled Texas House impeached him after his own senior aides accused him of flagrantly abusing his office to benefit donor Nate Paul; the Republican-controlled Senate acquitted him. (His wife, who serves in the chamber, was barred from voting, but later filed for divorce citing adultery.) A recent Associated Press investigation found that Paxton had taken over 275 out-of-state trips as attorney general, left roughly 730 workdays blank on his official calendars, and racked up at least $1.9 million in taxpayer-funded security expenses while visiting California wine country, ski resorts, Caribbean destinations, and European tourist spots. And on October 13, The Wall Street Journal reported that Paxton rang in 2025 in Dubai with his girlfriend (who is not his wife) and two fugitive Americans who had already been indicted on federal health-care-fraud charges and had not returned to the United States; one had donated $190,000 to Paxton. Trump won Texas by nearly 14 points in 2024, but Paxton’s race against James Talarico is a toss-up.

ROGER MARSHALL Republican—U.S. Senate, Kansas

Senator Roger Marshall spent 25 years as an obstetrician before entering office—and, according to a New York Times review of Kansas court records, sued more than 700 patients over unpaid medical bills along the way, including working-class patients struggling to make ends meet. His lawyers sought 18-percent annual interest, garnished wages and bank accounts, and repeatedly asked judges for arrest warrants when patients failed to appear at debt hearings. Eighty-one former patients were ultimately arrested; the bills ranged from several thousand dollars to as little as $101. One couple was taken into custody on Easter weekend while their grandchildren waited for an egg hunt. At issue: a $4,561 bill from an emergency hysterectomy. The couple spent two days in jail. Another woman said that after childbirth she sometimes had to choose between paying Marshall and paying her electric bill. Marshall’s campaign emphasizes that judges—not doctors—issued warrants, that patients were jailed for missing court proceedings rather than merely owing money, and that Marshall treated patients regardless of ability to pay. Fair enough. But Marshall’s lawyers repeatedly requested the warrants.

Then, earlier this month, a Kansas bakery owner revealed that Marshall’s 2020 Senate campaign had ordered $678.75 worth of cookies, cupcakes, brownies, and other treats for its primary-night party—and, she said, ignored her attempts to collect for nearly a year. The bill remained unpaid for six years, until her Facebook post went viral this month. Marshall’s campaign said it had “no idea how or why that happened” and promptly sent the bakery $1,300, roughly double the original invoice. “Better late than never,” the owner wrote. The senator whose lawyers once pursued patients over debts as small as $101 finally settled his own campaign’s cookie bill. Marshall won his last Senate race in 2020 by 11 points, but Cook now rates his contest against Democrat Adam Hamilton, a prominent cleric, as a toss-up.

BRANDON HERRERA Republican—Texas 23rd Congressional District

After Republican incumbent Tony Gonzales resigned amid a scandal over his affair with an aide who later died by suicide, Brandon Herrera inherited the GOP nomination. Known as “The AK Guy” to more than four million subscribers, Herrera has goose-stepped to Nazi marching music while firing an MP-40, displayed a vintage copy of Mein Kampf on his podcast, called the Civil War the “War of Northern Aggression,” belonged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and reenacted the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., while discussing the ballistics of the shot. Herrera says the Nazi material is historical humor, not an endorsement of national socialism. CNN then reviewed his enormous video archive and found years of crude remarks about women: comparing feminists’ weight to whales, elephants, and a nuclear bomb. He described one liberal woman talking about guns as “both fat and wrong,” and made sexual insults about gun-control activist Shannon Watts that CNN deemed too vulgar to repeat on air. Herrera dismissed the material as comedy. Trump and House Republican leaders endorsed him anyway. He is now the Republican nominee in a district that includes Uvalde, the scene of a gruesome school shooting in 2022. His Democratic opponent is attorney and former teacher Katy Padilla Stout, and the DCCC has added the district to its target list as a potential pickup. Cook moved the seat from Solid to Likely Republican after Herrera became the nominee.

SCOTT PERRY Republican—Pennsylvania 10th Congressional District

Scott Perry was not only one of the 147 Republicans who voted against certifying Joe Biden’s victory after the Capitol riot in 2021. According to the January 6 Committee, he helped connect Donald Trump with Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark, who was prepared to use the department to challenge Biden’s win, and pressed White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to elevate Clark as January 6 approached: “11 days to 1/6,” Perry texted. “We gotta get going!” The committee concluded that Perry worked with Clark, Trump, and Meadows to reverse the Justice Department’s findings and overturn the election result; Perry has never been charged with a crime.

In 2024, Perry’s campaign Facebook account shared an image of stereotypically Jewish bankers with hooked noses gathered around a Monopoly board resting on the backs of naked people. “Says it all…,” Perry wrote. His campaign removed the post after Jewish Insider contacted it, saying it had not known the image’s antisemitic history. Around the same time, Perry told colleagues that “replacement theory is real,” adding, “They added white to it to stop everybody from talking about it.” Perry is now seeking an eighth term against former local news anchor Janelle Stelson, whom he narrowly defeated in 2024. Cook rates the R+3 district, as of October 9, Lean Democratic.

RANDY FINE Republican—Florida 6th Congressional District

Randy Fine’s 2026 legislative agenda includes a bill called the Protecting Puppies from Sharia Act, which is not a parody. Fine introduced it after declaring on social media, “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.” The measure would cut federal funding to jurisdictions that prohibit residents from owning dogs—despite the fact that no American municipality has enshrined Sharia law and that Sharia law does not prohibit dog ownership. This followed an already extensive record of anti-Muslim rhetoric: he has called Representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib “Muslim terrorists,” responded to reports of hunger in Gaza with “starve away” and “#KeepOnStarving,” and suggested Gaza should be treated like Hiroshima and Nagasaki—before clarifying that nuking it would be a “terrible idea” because “the fallout would drift into Israel.” And this is not a doomed protest candidacy: Fine is a sitting member running in a R+14 district; Cook rates the race Solid Republican.

JOHN McGUIRE Republican—Virginia 5th Congressional District

When the Virginia Senate voted in 2024 to raise the state’s minimum marriage age from 16 to 18, the tally was 39 to 1. The one was John McGuire. Now a member of Congress, McGuire was asked this year whether he regretted the vote. He did not. “We need more families,” he said, arguing that if “a young man and a young girl get pregnant, they need to have a marriage.” The former Navy SEAL attended Trump’s January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally, though he says he never entered the Capitol. He later promoted a local screening of the discredited election-fraud movie 2000 Mules, and was elected to Congress in 2024 by challenging fellow Republican Bob Good in a primary that became, according to The Washington Post, “a proxy for a Trump loyalty contest.” McGuire won that race by 374 votes and survived a recount. Now he is seeking another term against former Congressman Tom Perriello in Virginia’s 5th, where Cook recently shifted the contest from Solid to Likely Republican.

MIKE COLLINS Republican—U.S. Senate, Georgia

At the first of their two October debates, Senator Jon Ossoff told his Republican challenger, Representative Mike Collins, that he “hired half the Third Reich to staff your congressional office,” and later added: “If John Lewis were marching today from Selma to Montgomery, Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy club.” David Brooks, for his part, thought Ossoff went too far, but you decide. Collins’s son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II, is a social-media influencer who has said, “there’s nothing wrong with White Nationalism,” promoted the white supremacist and neo-fascist hate group Patriot Front, circulated Nazi imagery, and blamed Jews for everything from gun control to pornography. Scheer lives at a property owned by Collins and attended Collins’s primary-night victory party. Collins says his son-in-law has never worked for the campaign and that he condemns racism and antisemitism. Then Collins replaced a congressional chief of staff after reporting revealed that the aide had participated in a group chat with white nationalists Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer while trying to secure the release of an imprisoned Holocaust denier. Another former Collins staffer posted swastika and apparent Ku Klux Klan imagery. In 2024, Collins shared a video of mostly white students confronting a Black pro-Palestinian protester at Ole Miss while one student made monkey noises and gestures, captioning it “Ole Miss taking care of business.” Collins later said he had not noticed that as the focal point and condemned racist behavior. He has also approvingly reposted an account mocking a Washington Post reporter’s Jewish identity, while insisting his criticism concerned her views, not her religion. The pattern has become central to his Senate race against Ossoff, who is Jewish. Recent polls put Collins about eight points behind Ossoff, so far behind that national Republican and Democratic groups alike are shifting advertising money out of Georgia to more competitive races.

DARIALIZA AVILA CHEVALIER Democrat—New York 13th Congressional District

Two things distinguish Darializa Avila Chevalier from the other candidates on this list: She is the only Democrat, and she is the only one running in a district so safe that Cook rates it D+32 and Solid Democratic. The two facts might be related. Her deleted-post archive is an oppo researcher’s dream. CNN uncovered posts and reposts advocating abolishing police, prisons, and national borders, seizing private property, and nationalizing major industries; one called for “no more police at all ever.” In a 2019 post, she disparaged interracial relationships with white women, mocking Black and Arab men for “fetishizing ugly colonizer women.” She still identifies as a democratic socialist but says she has grown since writing much of the material, though she still opposes all deportations (including for violent criminals). Her assessments of Democratic leaders were hardly more restrained: she called Joe Biden a “rapist” during the 2020 campaign and responded “F— Kamala Harris” after Harris told prospective migrants in Guatemala not to come to the United States; she later apologized for the Harris comment and noted that she voted for the ticket. Avila Chevalier emerged from Columbia’s pro-Palestinian activist movement and defeated longtime Representative Adriano Espaillat in the Democratic primary. In NY-13, her primary victory was the decisive electoral hurdle. Soon, she’ll be posting from inside the Capitol, where she will also be helping write the nation’s laws.

DARLINE GRAHAM Republican—U.S. Senate, South Carolina

Darline Graham became a United States senator two days after her brother, Lindsey Graham, died unexpectedly in July, when Governor Henry McMaster appointed her to fill his seat. She had little conventional political experience, but Donald Trump urged her to run for a full term. A month later, during a Republican debate, a moderator asked whether Taiwan and the South China Sea were national-security issues for the United States. Graham asked for the question again and then answered with unusual candor: “I’m not that informed on national security.” She added, “National security is not my thing, not my area of expertise, but I do support the military,” citing her brother’s Air Force service and her father’s Army service. The audience audibly reacted. Graham defended the answer as honesty—and then won the Republican nomination. Later, Graham was conspicuously absent from a bipartisan letter signed by 12 senators, including six Republicans, urging Trump to reverse his deal allowing Russian diesel sales and enforce a sanctions law named for her late brother—a law she herself had sponsored. Now she is running for a full six-year term, and the race has become uncomfortable enough for Republicans that the Senate Leadership Fund announced $5 million in spending to bolster her against Democrat Annie Andrews, while Trump is heading to South Carolina to campaign for her. Cook and Crystal Ball have moved the race from solid to likely Republican.