Over the last year I have been highlighting some, um, interesting GOP candidates. Now that the latest election cycle is over, it’s time to see what happened to them.

Back in March, the first person I looked at was Chris Miller, who was running in West Virginia to be the Republican gubernatorial nominee. There’s no graceful way to say this:  Miller is a weirdo. Here’s one of his offensive campaign ads:

I’m happy to say he lost his primary. The bad news is that the guy who won, who was just elected governor, Patrick Morrisey, is a piece of work, and all bad.

The next candidate I looked at, in May, was Simone Collins, who was running for the House in Pennsylvania. I called her a “ghoul” because of stuff like this:

The second thing is how they seem to feel about their actual children, like admitting they don’t heat their home because they put all their money toward their foundation (there’s obviously money for cosmetic dentistry because they both have shiny super white teeth though, so what’s a couple of freezing kids?). Simone says she’s “bored out of her mind” with infants, Malcolm admits he doesn’t like babies. And while out for lunch with the reporter, Malcolm slaps his 2 year old son across the face for kicking the table. They then go blithely on with an explanation justifying hitting their kids.

She lost her bid to unseat the Democratic incumbent last week. Some good news, especially as she and her husband are buddies with Elon Musk.

After that, there was Neil Friske, a state house representative in Michigan. Friske, who is against pornography, pro-conversion therapy, and he voted against raising the minimum marriage age to 18.  And in June he was arrested for chasing an adult dancer with a gun. Good times. Fiske lost his Republican primary over the summer, and so will no longer be a member of the Michigan legislature at the end of the year. And the state Attorney General is now looking into the incident.

Then there was Joseph De Soto, a candidate for the WV statehouse who turned out to be Dollar Store Gilead’s version of George Santos. Here’s a taste of his lies:

Claim #1 – De Soto said he’s provided hundreds of people in Berkeley County and in the Navajo Nation with free health care.

FACT: De Soto is not licensed to practice medicine anywhere in the United States.

Despite claiming to have provided health care for people on his website and during appearances on WNRN’s “Eastern Panhandle Talk,” De Soto has no license to practice medicine.  He has also advertised himself as a doctor under the name “De Soto Medical LLC” since March of 2024, but only registered this business in May. 

De Soto had no Democratic challenger, so unfortunately he won his race.

Another local candidate was Hung Cao, who was running for to unseat Senator Tim Kaine in Virginia. He lost his election after a spectacularly weird debate with Kaine, which included this outburst:

Hung Cao, the Republican candidate for Virginia’s U.S. Senate seat, blamed a drag queen for low military recruitment numbers and said the military needs self-cannibalizing “alpha males and females” instead.

During his Wednesday night debate against incumbent Sen. Tim Kaine (D), Cao — a Navy veteran endorsed by former President Donald Trump — was asked about his former comments claiming that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives under the administration of President Joe Biden were causing the lowest military recruitment numbers in 80 years.

“When you’re using a drag queen to recruit for the Navy, that’s not the people we want,” replied Cao. “What we need is alpha males and alpha females who are going to rip out their own guts, eat them, and ask for seconds. Those are young men and women that are going to win wars.”

Cao lost to Kaine.

Last month I looked at another Republican local candidate, Derrick Anderson, who pretended another person’s family was his own in his campaign ads. He lost to Eugene Vindman.

These are all small victories in their own way, and right now I’ll take every victory I can.

I’ll end with this: